Ved Parkash Mehta (Born March 21, 1934) is a writer who was born in Lahore, British India (now a Pakistani city) to a Hindu family. He lost his sight at the age of four as the result of an attack of cerebrospinal meningitis. Because of the limited prospects for blind people in general, his father, a doctor, sent him over 1,300 miles away to the Dadar School for the Blind in Bombay.
Mehta has lived in the Western world since 1949; he became an American citizen in 1975. He was educated at Pomona College, at Balliol College, Oxford where he read Modern History, and at Harvard University, where he earned a double BA and MA. His first book, an autobiography called Face to Face, which placed his early life in the context of Indian politics and history and Anglo-Indian relations, was published in 1957. Since then he has written more than 24 books, including several that deal with the subject of blindness, as well as hundreds of articles and short stories, for British, Indian and American publications such as The New Yorker, where he was a staff writer from 1961 to 1994. He left the magazine after, as he has claimed, he was "terminated" by editor Tina Brown.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.
His wife, Linn Cary Mehta, is the niece of Mehta's former New Yorker colleague Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr.; they married in 1983.