Rakesh Satyal

Rakesh Satyal
on Aug 28, 2019

About & Early Life

Rakesh Satyal is an American novelist, best known for his Lambda Literary Award-winning debut novel Blue Boy. Blue Boy won the 2009 Prose/Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies and was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and Satyal was a recipient of a 2010 Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Rakesh Satyal was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. His parents, Vinay and Lalitha Satyal, emigrated to the United States from India. He has a fraternal twin brother, Vikas. His older brother is stand-up comedian Rajiv Satyal. Satyal attended Fairfield Senior High School. He attended Princeton University, where he majored in Comparative Literature with an emphasis on French, Spanish, and Italian, and earned a certificate in the school’s prestigious creative writing program.[citation needed] He was a member of the a cappella group the Princeton Nassoons. His freshman year, he created the celebration that occurs each semester on Dean’s Date, where students cheer on their classmates to turn in their written work on time.

Career

With the exception of a few years in the world of branding, Satyal has worked in book publishing since 2001, when he was an intern at Random House. He worked at what was formerly known as the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, then HarperCollins. He is currently a Senior Editor at Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. Over the course of his career, he has worked with such authors as Tori Amos, Clive Barker, Terry Castle, Paulo Coelho, Shane Dawson, Joey Graceffa, Vestal McIntyre, Armistead Maupin, Rahul Mehta, Ann Powers, and Paul Rudnick. Blue Boy was published in 2009. Satyal’s second novel, No One Can Pronounce My Name, was published in May 2017 by Picador USA. His work has also appeared in the anthologies The Man I Might Become, Fresh Men 2, The Letter Q, and Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey. Satyal sometimes performs in New York City as a singer. His cabaret act has been mentioned in The New Yorker, the New York Observer, and Page Six. He also garnered attention for his acceptance speech at the Lambda Literary Awards gala, which he sang to the tune of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance. His novel No One Can Pronounce My Name is being made into a film by Christine Vachon of Killer Films.

Personal life

Satyal lives in New York City with his husband John Maas, a literary agent. His brother is comedian Rajiv Satyal. He has a fraternal twin, Vikas Satyal.