Gregory David Roberts

Robbed building societies in Melbourne to pay for an addiction, was sentenced to nineteen years, escaped over the wall of a maximum security prison in daylight, and lived for years in a Bombay slum where he ran an unlicensed clinic.

Shantaram is drawn from that, written three times because prison guards destroyed the first two drafts.

How much is true is genuinely disputed. Journalists have challenged specific episodes, particularly the Afghan war sections, and he has described the book as a novel while readers have consistently taken it as memoir. He served the remainder of his sentence after being caught in Frankfurt. The Bombay of the first half is what people press on each other.