Satendra Nandan was born in the Indian town of Nadi in 1940. He attended Delhi University after completing his secondary education in the field of engineering. He worked as an educator in India, including a stint at the Doon School, an all-boys residential school in Dehradun. Later, he completed his MA from the University of Leeds and went on to become a teacher at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji, in 1969. He began his doctoral work in May 1974 at the Australian National University on “The Image of the Artist in the Fiction of Patrick White” and was the first to complete a PhD in English from the South Pacific. His brief tenure in politics ended with the 1987 Fijian coup, and he went to Australia, where he continued to teach till he returned to Fiji to teach at the newly founded University of Fiji. He currently lives in Canberra, Australia, with his wife, Jyoti Nandan, and three children.