Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee was the author of several novels, short story collections, and works of nonfiction. She was born in 1940 in Calcutta, India, where her father ran a pharmaceutical company while her mother was a homemaker. When Mukherjee was eight years old, the family moved to Europe, and she studied in Basel and London before the family returned to Calcutta three years later. She graduated from the University of Calcutta in 1959 with a degree in English, received a master’s degree from the University of Baroda, and was then accepted into the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she studied with Philip Roth, among others. She received her MFA in 1963 and completed a PhD in comparative literature, also at the University of Iowa, in 1969. In 1966, Mukherjee moved to Montreal to teach at McGill University, and she briefly lived in Toronto in the late 1970s before returning to the United States in 1980. Beginning in 1989, she taught postcolonial and world literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She died in New York City in 2017.