Manil Suri, professor of mathematics and statistics at UMBC, has been named a 2004 Guggenheim Fellow for his exemplary work in the field of fiction writing.Suri was one of 184 distinguished scientists, scholars and artists selected to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship from a field more than 3,200 applicants.

After the publication of Suri's first novel, The Death of Vishnu (W.W.Norton & Company, 2001), he was named a Time magazine “Person to Watch.” His book garnered rave reviews from critics, including those writing forThe New York Times Book Review, the Boston Sunday Globe and Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

A scholar who is seriously engaged in the discipline of mathematics, Suri has taught at UMBC since 1983. His fiction was largely unknown, even to UMBC faculty, until the publication of an excerpt from The Death of Vishnu appeared in a February 2001 issue of The New Yorker.