Rohinton Mistry was born in 1952 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India and emigrated to Canada in 1975, living in Brampton from 1981 to 1999. He won his first literary award in 1985. While attending the University of Toronto he won two Hart House literary prizes (the first to win two), for stories which were published in the Hart House Review, and Canadian Fiction Magazine's annual Contributor's Prize for 1985. Two years later, Penguin Books Canada published his collection of 11 short stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag, which was later published in the United States as Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag. When his second book, the novel Such a Long Journey, was published in 1991, it won the Governor General's Award (1991), the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (1992) and the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award (1991). It was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize and for the Trillium Award. It has been translated into German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Japanese, and has been made into the 1998 film Such a Long Journey. His third book, and second novel, A Fine Balance (1995), won the second annual Giller Prize in 1995, and in 1996, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. It was selected for Oprah's Book Club in 2001 and sold hundreds of thousands of additional copies throughout North America as a result. It won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers Prize and was shortlisted for the 1996 Booker prize. Mr. Mistry also won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, presented by the Royal Society of Literature (1996), and has been made a fellow of the Guggenheim and Trudeau Foundation and received Doctor of Letters from Ryerson and York Universities.
