The Humble Administrator's Garden is a collection of poetry written by Vikram Seth. It is his first collection, published in 1985.
The three Chinese poets translated here are among the greatest literary figures of China, or indeed the world. Wang Wei with his quiet love of nature and Buddhist philosophy; Li Bai, the Taoist spirit, with his wild, flamboyant paeans to wine and the moon; and Du Fu, with his Confucian sense of sympathy with the …
Vikram Seth's second non-fiction work, Two Lives, is the story of a century and of a love affair across an ethnic divide. As the name suggests, it is a story of two extraordinary lives, that of his great uncle, Shanti Behari Seth, and of his German Jewish great aunt, Hennerle Gerda Caro. Two Lives is divided into five …