Sadanand Dhume is a writer and journalist based in Washington, DC and New Delhi. His first book, My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist, is published by Text Publishing in Australia, Skyhorse Publishing, an affiliate of W. W. Norton, in the United States, and Ufuk Press in Indonesia. An Indian edition is forthcoming from Tranquebar Press.
Part travelogue, part memoir, My Friend the Fanatic charts the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country and one long considered the least hospitable to any kind of religious fundamentalism.
Between 1999 and 2004 Sadanand lived in Asia. He served as India bureau chief of the Far Eastern Economic Review and as Indonesia correspondent of FEER and The Wall Street Journal Asia. As a freelance writer he continues to contribute essays, op-eds and reviews to FEER and WSJ, as well as to, among others, The Washington Post, Forbes, Commentary, YaleGlobal and Foreign Policy. His television appearances include CNN, PBS, BBC World, Al Jazeera International, CNBC Asia and ABC Television; he has also been interviewed by BBC World Service Radio, ABC Radio and ABC Radio (Australia). He blogs at http://trueslant.com/sadananddhume/
In 2007 Sadanand was an inaugural Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the Asia Society, with which he remains affiliated as a non-resident fellow. He is currently working on two books: a work of narrative nonfiction about contemporary India set in Delhi and an allegorical novel about totalitarianism.
Sadanand holds a master’s degree in international relations from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, a master’s in journalism from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the University of Delhi.
