Shashi Tharoor, the Indian writer and whiz kid of the United Nations, was appointed on Friday as undersecretary-general for public information, a job he has held on a temporary basis for the past 16 months.

A life-long U.N. official, Tharoor, 46, is author of six novels and two nonfiction books. Educated in India and London, he was 22 years old when he earned a doctorate and two masters degrees at Tuft's University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Massachusetts.

The delay in making permanent Tharoor's appointment as head of the Department of Public Information was in part because of his youth, said Fred Eckhard, spokesman for Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The department has more than 400 staff in New York and 300 abroad.

"He is unusually young to achieve this level. I think probably the secretary-general wanted to give him a chance to see what he could do," said Eckhard, adding that Tharoor had submitted a reorganization plan last week.

His new post is fraught with difficulties and several ambassadors, including former U.S. representative Richard Holbrooke, have criticized the department as wasteful.

Tharoor has written four elegant novels chronicling the fantasies and foibles of India as well as political commentary for magazines and newspapers.

He is author of an award-winning 1989 political satire, "The Great Indian Novel" and in 1997 wrote "India: from Midnight to the Millennium," a political and economic study after independence.

"As a career civil servant, this is not an appointment any of us aspire to," Tharoor told Reuters. "For me serving the United Nations has been my life's work and serving this secretary-general has been a source of immense pride and satisfaction."

Tharoor joined the United Nations in May 1978 in the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva and was head of its Singapore office at the peak of the Vietnamese "boat people" crisis in the early 1980s.

He was transferred to the peacekeeping department in New York in 1989, several years before Annan led that division. During Tharoor's tenure, he was the desk officer for the controversial U.N. operations during the Bosnian war.

When Annan became secretary-general in 1997, Tharoor was transferred to his executive office.

Tharoor frequently attended the "Renaissance" New Year's weekends of prominent thinkers that included former President Bill Clinton. In 1989 he was named by the World Economic Forum in Davos as a "global leader of tomorrow."

Separated from his wife, Tharoor is the father of 17-year old twin sons.