Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a writer born in Calcutta, India, who has lived for decades in the United States, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Houston. She writes in English, and her output spans poetry, novels, short stories and books for children and young adults. Her work is largely concerned with India and with the experience of South Asian immigrants in North America, and her career, which began in the late twentieth century, has continued into the twenty-first.

She studied English at the University of Calcutta, graduating in 1976, and that same year moved to the United States to earn a master's degree at Wright State University. She later completed a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985, with a dissertation on Christopher Marlowe. As a student she supported herself with a range of odd jobs, from babysitting to slicing bread in a bakery, and that experience of money worries and getting by recurs in the lives of many of her characters.

Divakaruni began as a poet. Her early collections, among them Black Candle and Leaving Yuba City, focus on women from South Asia. She turned to fiction with the story collection Arranged Marriage, which won an American Book Award in 1996, and then with novels such as The Mistress of Spices, adapted into a film in 2005, and Sister of My Heart. Her writing often blends realism with fantasy, myth and the retelling of epic traditions, as in The Palace of Illusions, which recounts the Mahabharata from the perspective of Draupadi.

Her legacy extends to young readers through the fantasy series The Brotherhood of the Conch, set in India, and to her community work. She co-founded Maitri, a helpline for South Asian women facing domestic abuse, and has supported literacy programmes for disadvantaged children in India. Her fiction has been translated into many languages and has inspired stage, television and opera adaptations, making her a reference point for readers interested in migration and identity.