Karan Mahajan is a Joseph Henry Jackson Award

Joseph Henry Jackson Award

The Joseph Henry Jackson Award is a literary award offered annually to promising young California writers. The award is sponsored by and administered by Intersection for the Arts. There is no entry fee to apply for this award. Recipients receive $2000....

-winning India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

ist. Mahajan was born in Stamford, Connecticut

Stamford, Connecticut

Stamford is a city in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. According to the 2010 census, the population of the city is 122,643, making it the fourth largest city in the state and the eighth largest city in New England...

, and grew up in New Delhi

New Delhi

New Delhi is the capital city of India. It serves as the centre of the Government of India and the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. New Delhi is situated within the metropolis of Delhi. It is one of the nine districts of Delhi Union Territory. The total area of the city is...

, India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

. He studied English and Economics at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

. He currently lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn

Brooklyn

Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...

. He has contributed writing to The Believer

The Believer (magazine)

The Believer is a United States literary magazine that also covers other arts and general culture. Founded and designed in 2003 by the writer and publisher Dave Eggers, it is edited by Vendela Vida, Heidi Julavits and Ed Park...

, The Daily Beast

The Daily Beast

The Daily Beast is an American news reporting and opinion website founded and published by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker as well as the short-lived Talk Magazine. The Daily Beast was launched on October 6, 2008, and is owned by IAC...

, The San Francisco Chronicle, Granta

Granta

Granta is a literary magazine and publisher in the United Kingdom whose mission centers on its "belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real." In 2007, The Observer stated, "In its blend of...

,The New York Sun, and The Utopian.

Family Planning

Mahajan's first novel, Family Planning, was described by the San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco Chronicle

thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...

as "Brave, breakneck, and amusing"'; in the Seattle Times as "Pleasurably crazed"; and in the Washington Post as "Genuinely funny" and "Profound". Author Suketu Mehta

Suketu Mehta

Suketu Mehta is a writer based in New York City. He was born in Kolkata, India, and raised in Bombay where he lived until his family moved to the New York area in 1977. He has attended New York University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.His autobiographical account of his experiences...

 described it as "The truest portrait of modern New Delhi I’ve read, and the funniest book of the year", and novelist Jay McInerney

Jay McInerney

John Barrett McInerney Jr. is an American writer. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City; Ransom; Story of My Life; Brightness Falls; and The Last of the Savages...

 called it "one of the best and funniest first novels I’ve read in years".

Family Planning was published by the Harper Perennial imprint of HarperCollins

HarperCollins

HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...

, and released in the US in 2008 and the UK in 2009, with translations forthcoming in India, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Brazil, and Korea.

Trivia

In 2003, Stanford University forced Mahajan and several other students to move out of their university-owned cottages so that they could be reserved for use as quarantine facilities for students with symptoms of SARS.

In 2004, Mahajan and two roommates opened a museum dedicated to Matthias K. Rath in their dormitory room at Stanford University.