After Ruskin Bond, Stephen Alter is perhaps the most well-known writer in Mussoorie. He is equally comfortable writing both fiction and non-fiction. Alter is founding director of the Mussoorie Writers’ Mountain Festival. Despite that busy job, his literary output has indeed been prodigious: 15 books, nine fiction and remaining non-fiction is no mean achievement. His latest The Rataban Betrayal, is a ‘literary thriller’ with Mussoorie in its backdrop.u00a0Alter doesn’t fit into a straitjacket ethnic profile. He is of American lineage, but was born and raised in Landour Cantonment in Mussoorie. His wife of 35 years, Ameeta, is Punjabi. The Indian diaspora in the US is called ‘American Desis’; likewise, Alter could easily be described as a desi American. It was in 1916 that his missionary grandparents came to study at the Landour Language School. In the 1930s, his grandfather became the principal of Woodstock, Mussoorie’s famed American international school. Later, his parents, too, were respected staffers at Woodstock for more than 30 years. In a rare achievement, his father Reverend Bob Alter, too, was subsequently appointed as its principal in 1968 and remained in that top post for the following 10 years.After completing schooling at Woodstock, Alter went to the US and graduated in History from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. For 10 years, he was a Writer-in-Residence in the Programme in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also taught courses in fiction and non-fiction writing. Before that he was director of the Writing Program at the American University in Cairo, Egypt for seven years.