Vikram Chandra was born in Delhi, India, to Navin Chandra, a business executive, and Kamna Chandra, a noted screenplay writer. He completed most of his secondary education at Mayo College, Ajmer, Rajasthan. After spending a short while at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai, Chandra emigrated to the United States. In 1984, he received a BA degree in English with distinction in creative writing from Pomona College, Claremont. Later, he enrolled himself at the Film School, Columbia University, New York, where the autobiography of Colonel James “Sikander” Skinner, a legendary nineteenth-century soldier born of an Indian mother and a British father, inspired him to write his first book. He left the Film School at Columbia University halfway as he began working on Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Chandra enrolled in different writing programs and studied under postmodernist literary stalwarts like John Barth and Donald Barthelme while completing an MA at Johns Hopkins and an MFA at the University of Houston. While writing Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Chandra supported himself by teaching literature, writing, and working as an independent computer programmer, a software and hardware consultant. Currently, he shuttles between Mumbai and Berkeley, where he is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.