Jeffery Paine

Jeffery Paine is a writer recognized for his work in bringing Eastern culture and spirituality to popular audiences in the West. "Jeffery Paine is an unusual voice in American letters," observed Indian novelist and Underscretary General of the United Nations Shashi Tharoor, "one steeped in the wisdom of the East and yet infused with a knowing and witty sensibility that is profoundly Western." Paine's books, such as Father India and Re-enchantment, have been named by publications ranging from Publishers Weekly to Spirituality & Health as "Best Book of the Year." His writing falls in the category of creative or literary nonfiction, which unites original scholarship with the dramatic narrative and character development associated with a novel.

Biographical

Paine was born midcentury in Houston and grew up in Goose Creek and Baytown, Texas. He studied history at Rice University and received his PhD in crosscultural intellectual history from Princeton University. When he began writing he supported himself by managing hotels in America and Europe, including the oldest hotel in Amsterdam, and afterwards by working in advertising and public relations. He was later the editor-in-chief of Universal Reference Publishers and literary editor of the magazine the Wilson Quarterly.

He has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and from the Templeton Foundation to study Tibetan medicine at Cambridge University. During the 1990s he was regularly a visiting fellow at the East–West Center in Honolulu and subsequently had residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. Paine has been a guest professor at Princeton University, San Francisco State University, the New School for Social Research, the Volksuniversiteit Amsterdam, and the University of Minnesota.

Major works

In Father India (1998) Paine revealed the 20th Century Euro-American encounter with India through a different lens, in a new light.