Vijay Mishra was born on May 4, 1945, in Suva, Fiji, to Hari Mishra and Lila Mishra, and educated at Lelean Memorial School. He completed his Senior Cambridge Higher School Certificate in the First Division. A British colonial scholarship took him to Victoria University of Wellington and Christchurch Teachers’ College where he gained a BA and a Diploma in Teaching. He completed a master’s degree in English literature at Sydney University in 1969 and joined Murdoch University in Perth in 1976 as a tutor in World Literature. In 1978, he left to pursue a PhD in Medieval Indian Poetry and Aesthetics at the Australian National University, which he completed in 1981. Thereafter, he acquired a DPhil in English Literature at Oxford University in 1989 and held the position of Professor of English Literature at the University of Alberta in Canada. He was the Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow between 2010 and 2015. Overall, he is recognized as a scholastic literary figure contributing to fields like cultural studies, migration and identity, film, and cinema among others.