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Biography
Deborah Baker is a biographer and essayist. She is married to the writer Amitav Ghosh and lives in Brooklyn, Calcutta, and Goa. She is the author of A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, a biography of Allen Ginsberg that focuses on his time in India and of Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 1994. She also writes for the Los Angeles Times. Her book The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (2011) is a biography of Maryam Jameelah (born Margaret Marcus), a Jewish woman from New York who converted to Islam. In 2012, she wrote a critical review for the Wall Street Journal of Defender of the Realm, the Manchester-Reid biography of Winston Churchill.
Baker was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.