Humble Administrator's Garden - Tapa blanda

'Vikram Seth's poems...should have an impact far beyond much noisier pieces; for when did we last see a volume in which the poet's eye is on what is objectively before him, rather than on the intricacies of his own sensibility? Seth knows (not as a tourist, but from the inside) four cultures: his native India; England; California; communist China. Here he inspects them all respectfully and eagerly, and without partisanship or facile ironies balances each of them against the others.' - Donald Davie

Born in Calcutta in 1952, Vikram Seth studied at Oxford, Stanford University and in China. He is a noted travel writer. From Heaven Lake, an account of his walk through Sinkiang and Tibet, received the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1983. The Humble Administrator's Garden, first published in 1985, won a commonwealth Poetry Prize and his best-selling verse novel, The Golden Gate, was widely acclaimed when it appeared in 1986. His subsequent novel, A Suitable Boy, was a worldwide bestseller.