Raj Kamal Jha is Editor of The Indian Express. He joined the newspaper in 1996 as Deputy Editor (Operations) and then was Executive Editor. Jha is a 1988 graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, where he studied Mechanical Engineering. He did his Master's in Journalism at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and in 1989-90, did reporting internships at the Los Angeles Times in Los Angeles and the Washington Post in Washington, D.C. He has been an Assistant Editor (News) at The Statesman in Kolkata and Senior Associate Editor at India Today magazine, New Delhi. Jha was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the international journalism programme where he taught a course on Reporting on India after 9/11. He was also a writing fellow at the Yaddo Residency in Saratoga Springs, New York. Jha is the author of three novels that have been published in more than a dozen foreign languages: The Blue Bedspread (1999-2000), won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia region) and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; his second novel If You Are Afraid of Heights was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award 2003. His third novel, Fireproof, was published in 2006.