Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee
Speaking at the US Ambassador's residence in Israel, June 11, 2004
Born	(1940-07-27) July 27, 1940 (age 76) Calcutta, West Bengal, India
Occupation	Professor, novelist, essayist, short story writer, author, fiction writer, non-fiction writer
Nationality	India, United States, Canada
Genre	Novels, short stories, essays, travel literature, journalism.
Subjects	Post-colonial Anglophone fiction, Asian American fiction, autobiographical narratives, memoirs, american culture, immigration history, reformation and nationhood in the '90s, multiculturalism vs. mongrelization, fiction writing, autobiography writing, and the form and theory of fiction.
Notable works	Jasmine

Bharati Mukherjee (born July 27, 1940) is an American writer and professor emerita in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Of Bengali origin, Mukherjee was born in 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).

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.