Manil Suri was born in July, 1959 in a city Mumbai. He spent several years of his life acquiring degrees in mathematics (B.Sc. (1979), University of Bombay; M.S. (1980) and Ph.D. (1983), Carnegie-Mellon University) followed by several years climbing the academic ladder as a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (assistant (1983-89), associate (1989-94), full professor (1994-present)).

In 1995, he did have his first story, "The Tyranny of Vegetables," published. Unfortunately, it was in a Bulgarian-language journal and he was only able to identify it by an author photograph next to the piece. He thinks the name of the journal is Orpheus , but as he is unable to read the title of the complimentary copy that came from Bulgaria, he cannot be sure.

He started The Death of Vishnu as a short story in 1995. It was inspired by the death of an actual man named Vishnu who had lived (and died) on the steps of the Bombay apartment building in which he grew up. By 1997, it had grown to three chapters, and he took it to a workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts led by Michael Cunningham. Cunningham began his critique with the exhortation to "keep writing this at any cost" and ended it with "you must do whatever is necessary to finish this." That's when Suri realized that perhaps the time for dabbling had come to an end, perhaps he had stumbled onto the start of something more serious. Three years later, an excerpt, "The Seven Circles" appeared in The New Yorker, bringing in his first non-Bulgarian audience.

In addition to Michael Cunningham, Suri has taken writing workshops with two other wonderful teachers: authors Jane Bradley and Vikram Chandra. He has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the MacDowell Colony, and was the winner of the 1998 Jenny McKean Moore Residency Fellowship awarded biannually by George Washington University.