Four Indian Americans have been selected as part of the 2026 class of Guggenheim Fellows, recognized for their contributions across various fields including literature and computer science.
Four distinguished Indian Americans—Amitav Ghosh, Megha Majumdar, Vivek Narayanan, and Vinod Vaikuntanathan—have been named among the 2026 class of Guggenheim Fellows. This prestigious group consists of 223 fellows selected from nearly 5,000 applicants across 55 disciplines.
The Guggenheim Fellowship program, established in 1925 by Senator Simon Guggenheim, awards each fellow a monetary stipend to pursue independent work under “the freest possible conditions.” The selection process emphasizes both prior achievements and exceptional promise in the respective fields of the applicants.
Edward Hirsch, an award-winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation, expressed pride in the new class, stating, “Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship.”
Amitav Ghosh, recognized in the General Nonfiction category, has a rich background that spans India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford and is the author of four nonfiction books, two essay collections, and nine novels. In 2018, Ghosh became the first English-language writer to receive India’s highest literary honor, the Jnanpith Award. Additionally, in 2019, he was named one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade by Foreign Policy magazine.
Megha Majumdar, a distinguished lecturer in English at Hunter College, City University of New York, was selected in the fiction category. A native of Kolkata, India, she teaches in Hunter’s MFA Creative Writing Program. Her second novel, A Guardian and a Thief, has been recognized as a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. This marks the second time Majumdar has received a nomination; her debut novel, A Burning, was a New York Times bestseller and a 2020 Times Notable Book.
Vivek Narayanan, who won in the poetry category, is affiliated with George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia. Born in India to Tamil parents and raised in Zambia, he earned an MA in cultural anthropology from Stanford University and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University. His published works include Universal Beach (Harbour Line Press, 2006/In Girum Books, 2011), Life and Times of Mr S (HarperCollins India, 2012), and After (New York Review of Books, 2022).
Vinod Vaikuntanathan, a Ford Foundation professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was chosen to advance research in computer science. His work focuses on securing information systems, particularly the foundations of cryptography and its applications in theoretical computer science. Recent research by Vaikuntanathan includes exploring the interactions between cryptography, quantum computing, statistics, and machine learning. His accolades include the Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Award, the Gödel Prize, and the Simons Investigator Award, among others.
The recognition of these four Indian Americans as Guggenheim Fellows highlights their significant contributions to their respective fields and underscores the diverse talent present in the Indian American community.
The information was reported in a news release from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.