Bharati Mukherjee was born July 27, 1940 in Calcutta, India.  In 1961 she came to America to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa where she earned her Ph. D. in English and Comparative Literature.  Mukherjee and husband Clark Blaise lived in Canada until 1980 when they decided to move to the United States, where she has become a naturalized citizen.  She describes herself as a “committed immigrant” and refuses to be labeled as an Asian-American writer.  In an article she wrote for Mother Jones magazine, she explains, “rejecting hyphenation is my refusal to categorize the cultural landscape into a center and its peripheries; it is to demand that the American nation deliver the promises of its dream and its Constitution to all its citizens equally” (italics my own).  In 1988 her collection of short stories, The Middlemen and Other Stories, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is currently an English professor at the University of California, Berkeley.                            
                                                                                                                                                                Image is from                                                                                                                                                                         Mother Jones                                                                                                                                                                              magazine

For an interview with Mukherjee, go to:

For another interview with Mukherjee, go to: