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.