Houston: Two Indian-American writers, Vijay Seshadri and Manil Suri, have received the 2004 Guggenheim fellowships of the 80th annual US and Canadian competition.

Seshadri, a poet and Suri, a novelist and mathematician, are among 185 artists, scholars and scientists from the United States and Canada, who participated in the competition, with prize money of $ 6.9 mn.

Seshadri, professor and director of Graduate Non-Fiction writing program, Sarah Lawrence College, immigrated to America at age of five in 1959 and grew up in Columbus, Ohio. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in the AGNI, Threepenny Review, The New Yorker, Shenandoah, Antaeus, and The Paris Review. Graywolf Press published a collection of his poetry, Wild Kingdom, in the spring of 1996.

A recipient of 'The Paris Review's Bernard F Connors Long Poem Prize, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and area studies fellowships from Columbia University, Seshadri is chairing the Writing Program in Non-Fiction at Sarah Lawrence College. He is also an editor at the New Yorker.

Suri, who was born in Mumbai in 1959, works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and author of the critically acclaimed novel "The Death of Vishnu". He migrated to the US in 1979 for further studies and career.

The competition was sponsored by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.