Raghu Karnad published his first book, Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War in 2015. It went on to win the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar prize and the Young Writers Prize from the Indian National Academy of Letters in 2016. In 2019, he received Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Raghu Karnad’s work as a journalist has also received multiple awards including the Lorenzo Natali Journalism Prize and a Press Institute of India National Award.

His reporting and essays have been published widely in magazines and newspapers including Granta, The Guardian, and The New York Times. In 2015, he co-founded TheWire.in, an independent news website.