Victor Rangel-Ribeiro was born in Goa in 1925, migrating to Bombay in 1939, where his short stories were first published in the late 1940s and '50s. His first novel, Tivolem, earned him the Milkweed National Fiction Prize in America and was short-listed for the Crossword Book Award in India, as well as being selected by Booklist as one of the "twenty notable first novels" of 1997-98.