Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee
Speaking at the US Ambassador's residence in Israel, June 11, 2004
Born	July 27, 1940 (1940-07-27) (age 69) Calcutta, West Bengal, India
Occupation	Professor, Novelist, Essayist, Short Story Writer, Author, Fiction Writer, Nonfiction Writer
Nationality	India, United States, Canada
Genres	Novels, Short Stories, Essays, Travel Literature, Journalism.
Notable work(s)	Jasmine
Influences Bernard Malamud, Henry Roth

Bharati Mukherjee (born July 27, 1940) is an award-winning Indian born American writer. She is currently a professor in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Background

Of Bengali origin, Mukherjee was born in Calcutta (now called Kolkata), West Bengal, India. She later travelled with her parents to Europe after Independence, only returning to Calcutta in the early 1950s. There she attended the Loreto School. She received her B.A. from the University of Calcutta in 1959 as a student of Loreto College, and subsequently earned her M.A. from the University of Baroda in 1961. She next travelled to the United States to study at the University of Iowa. She received her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1963 and her Ph.D. in 1969 from the department of Comparative Literature.

After more than a decade living in Montreal and Toronto in Canada, Mukherjee and her husband, Clark Blaise returned to the United States. She wrote of the decision in "An Invisible Woman," published in a 1981 issue of Saturday Night. Mukherjee and Blaise co-authored Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977). They also wrote the 1987 work, The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (Air India Flight 182).

Career

In addition to writing numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, Mukherjee taught at McGill University, Skidmore College, Queens College, and City University of New York before joining Berkeley.

• The Tiger's Daughter (1971)
• Wife (1975)
• Jasmine (1989)
• The Holder of the World (1993)
• Leave It to Me (1997)
• Desirable Daughters (2002)
• The Tree Bride (2004)

Short story collections

• Darkness (1985)
• The Middleman and Other Stories (1988)
• A Father

Memoir

• Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977, with Clark Blaise)

Non-fiction

• The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (1987, with Clark Blaise)
• Political Culture and Leadership in India (1991)
• Regionalism in Indian Perspective (1992)

Awards

• 1988: National Book Critics Circle Award (The Middleman and Other Stories).

See also

Literature portal

• Indian English literature

Further reading

• Abcarian, Richard and Marvin Klotz. "Bharati Mukherjee." In Literature: The Human Experience, 9th edition. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006: 1581-1582.
• Alter, Stephen and Wimal Dissanayake (ed.). "Nostalgia by Bharati Mukherjee." The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories. New Delhi, Middlesex, New York: Penguin Books, 1991: 28-40.
• Kerns-Rustomji, Roshni. "Bharati Mukherjee." In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 5th edition, Vol. E. Paul Lauter and Richard Yarborough (eds.). New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006: 2693-2694.
• New, W. H., ed. "Bharati Mukerjee." In Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002: 763-764.
• Selvadurai, Shyam (ed.). "Bharati Mukherjee:The Management of Grief." Story-Wallah: A Celebration of South Asian Fiction. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005:91-108.

External links

• India: In Word and Image

Biographies

• Voices from the Gaps
• Emory
• BBC World Service
• Edwardsly
• AMSAW
• Biography by Jaideep

Interviews

• PBS Interview with Bill Moyers
• Jouvert Interview
• Beatrice Interview 1997
• Powells Interview (April 2002)
• A conversation with Bharati Mukherjee (February 2003)

Misc.

• BBC World Service
• A Declaration of Independence
• Further links