Four distinguished Indian Americans — Amitav Ghosh, Megha Majumdar, Vivek Narayanan and Vinod Vaikuntanathan — are among the 2026 class of 223 Guggenheim Fellows across 55 disciplines.
Chosen from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants, the Class of 2026 Guggenheim Fellows was tapped based on both prior career achievement and exceptional promise, according to a news release from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each Fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.”
“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation.
Author Amitav Ghosh, chosen in General Nonfiction category grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and has a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford.
He is the author of four books of non-fiction, two collections of essays and nine novels. In 2018 he became the first English-language writer to receive India’s highest literary honor, the Jnanpith Award. In 2019, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade.
Megha Majumdar, a distinguished lecturer in English at Hunter College, City University of New York was chosen 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 named a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. It’s the second time Majumdar has been nominated for the prize; her debut novel, A Burning, a New York Times bestseller and a 2020 Times Notable Book, was longlisted.
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Vivek Narayanan of George Mason University Arlington, Virginia, who won in poetry category was 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.
Narayanan’s books of poems 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, Ford Foundation professor of engineering within EECS and CSAIL principal investigator,
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Somerville, was chosen to help “break new ground” in computer science.
Vaikuntanathan’s research is centered around securing our information systems. He focuses on the foundations of cryptography and its applications to theoretical computer science at large. His recent work includes analyzing how cryptography interacts with quantum computing, statistics, and machine learning.
Vaikuntanathan’s previous awards include the Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Award, the Goedel Prize, the Simons Investigator Award, the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, a Best Paper Award from CRYPTO 2024, and test-of-time awards from IEEE FOCS and CRYPTO conferences. He was also named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 2024