Alpa Shah is a British social anthropologist and writer specialising in South Asia. She is Professor of Anthropology at London School of Economics and author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas, a finalist for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing.
Shah has written for newspapers and magazines in the UK, US and India, including the New Statesman, Foreign Policy, New York Review of Books, The Times of India and Hindustan Times. Shah has also made a radio documentary on ‘India’s Red Belt’ for BBC Radio 4 Crossing Continents, reported for BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent, and co-curated a major photographic exhibition ‘Behind the Indian Boom’.
Books in order of publication:
In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India. Durham (N.C.) and London: Duke University Press. Delhi: Oxford University Press. – 2010
Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st Century India. (co-authored with Jens Lerche, Richard Axelby, Dalel Benbabaali, Brendan Donegan, Jayaseelan Raj and Vikramaditya Thakur). London: Pluto Press; Delhi: Oxford University Press (Translated into Hindi). – 2017
Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas. London: Hurst; Chicago: University of Chicago Press; New Delhi: HarperCollins. (Translated into Italian, French, Hindi and Bengali). – 2018
The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India. New York: HarperCollins. – 2024
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