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At the personal invitation of the Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Lord Patten of Barnes, Vikram Seth will deliver the Chancellor’s Lecture at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival.

Indian novelist, travel writer, poet, librettist, children’s author and essayist, Vikram Seth is one of the most versatile writers living today. His new book, The Rivered Earth, is a series of four libretti written to be set to the music of Alec Roth. They are called Songs in Time of War, Shared Ground, The Traveller and Seven Elements. The works are inspired by Chinese and Indian poetry and by the Salisbury home of English poet George Herbert now owned by Seth.

Seth was born in Calcutta in 1952 but was largely educated in the UK and the United States. He attended Tonbridge School before going on to study philosophy, politics and economics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He then did a graduate degree in economics at Stanford University.

His novel, A Suitable Boy, published in 1993, is one of the longest in the English language at 591,552 words. It is set in post-independence India and follows four families over 18 months as a mother searches for a suitable man to marry her daughter. A sequel, called A Suitable Girl, is due to be published in 2013.

His first novel, The Golden Gate (1986), was a novel in verse about the lives of young professionals in San Francisco, while his third novel, An Equal Music (1999), is set in the world of classical music in modern Europe.

Seth has published several volumes of poetry including Mappings and Beastly Tales and a number of works of non-fiction, including From Heaven Lake and Two Lives. He has won many awards, notably the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Commonwealth poetry prize and the WH Smith Literary Award.