Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee (July 27, 1940 – January 28, 2017) was an Indian American writer and professor emerita in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the author of a number of novels and short story collections, as well as works of nonfiction.

Of Indian Hindu Bengali Brahmin origin, Mukherjee was born in present-day Kolkata, West Bengal, India during British rule. 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 Maharaja Sayajirao 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 PhD 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-authoredDays 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).

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

In 1988 Mukherjee won the National Book Critics Circle Award- for her collection The Middleman and Other Stories. In a 1989 interview with Ameena Meer, Mukherjee stated that she considers herself an American writer, and not an Indian expatriate writer.

Mukherjee died due to complications of rheumatoid arthritis and takotsubo cardiomyopathy on January 28, 2017 in Manhattan at the age of 76. She was survived by her husband and son. Her other son, Bart, predeceased her in 2015.

• 1988: National Book Critics Circle Award (The Middleman and Other Stories).
• Mukherjee was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.) from Whittier College in 2013.

• The Tortilla Curtain– T.C.Boyle