Deborah Baker

Deborah Baker is an American biographer and essayist. She was born on March 28, 1959, in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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 In 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.

Family She is married to the Indian Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh and lives in Brooklyn, Calcutta, and Goa.

Awards Baker was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.

In 2016, she was awarded a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to complete her book, The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire.

Works Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly; Charlottesville, Va., 1981. In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding; New York : Grove Weidenfeld, 1992. , A Blue Hand: The Beats in India; New York : Penguin Press, 2008. , The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism. Saint Paul, Minn. : Graywolf, 2013. , The Last Englishmen, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, 2018. , Charlottesville: An American Story, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, 2025.