Stephen Alter is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and non-fiction. He was born in Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, India and much of his writing focuses on the Himalayan region. Wild Himalaya: A Natural History of the Greatest Mountain Range on Earth (Aleph 2019), his most recent work of non-fiction, received the 2020 Banff Mountain Book Award in the Mountain Environment and Natural History category. Becoming a Mountain: Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime (Aleph 2014) received the Kekoo Naoroji Award for Himalayan Literature. In The Jungles of the Night: A Novel about Jim Corbett (Aleph, 2016) is his latest work of fiction, which was shortlisted for the DSC South Asian Literature Award. The Cloudfarers (Puffin, 2018) is his most recent book for younger readers. He has written extensively on natural history, folklore and mountain culture, particularly in his travel memoir Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage to the Many Sources of the Ganga. Educated at Woodstock School and Wesleyan University, Alter has taught at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, where he was director of the writing program for seven years. Following this, he was writer-in-residence at MIT for ten years, where he taught courses in creative writing. Among the honors he has received are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the East West Centre in Hawaii, and the Banff Centre for Mountain Culture. Stephen Alter is founding director of the Mussoorie Mountain Festival.