He graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce from Allahabad University before earning his Master of Arts degree in English literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
In 2005, Mishra published an anthology of writing on India, India in Mind (Vintage). His writings have been anthologized in The Picador Book of Journeys (2000), The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (2004), and Away: The Indian Writer as Expatriate (Penguin), among other titles. He has introduced new editions of Rudyard Kipling's Kim (Modern Library), E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (Penguin Classics), and J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur (NYRB Classics). He has also introduced two volumes of V. S. Naipaul's essays: The Writer and the World and Literary Occasions.
Mishra writes literary and political essays for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, and the New Statesman, among other American, British, and Indian publications. His work has also appeared in Bloomberg, The Boston Globe, Common Knowledge, the Financial Times, Granta, The Independent, the London Review of Books, n+1, The Nation, Outlook, Poetry, Time, the Times Literary Supplement, Travel + Leisure, and The Washington Post. He divides his time between London and India, and is presently working on a novel.
He was the Visiting Fellow for 2007-2008 at the Department of English, University College London, UK. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008.
His new book is From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia.