Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee (July 27, 1940 – January 28, 2017) was an American and Canadian writer and professor emerita in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in India, she was the author of a number of novels and short story collections, as well as works of nonfiction that often focused on the experience of Indian immigrants to America.

Early life and education 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.

Career

In 1966, Mukherjee and her family moved to Canada, where she became a naturalized citizen and worked at McGill University.

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

In 1988 Mukherjee won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection The Middleman and Other Stories. That year, she also became a naturalized American citizen.

Death 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.

Works

Novels 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) Miss New India (2011)

Short story collections Darkness (1985) The Middleman and Other Stories (1988) The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee (2023)

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)

Awards and honors 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.

Related novels The Tortilla Curtain– T. C. Boyle