BORDER BOOK FESTIVAL
FEATURED WRITER AND ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author and poet. Her work is widely known, as she has been published in over 50 magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing has been included in over 50 anthologies. Her works have been translated into 20 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew and Japanese.
She was born in India and lived there until 1976, at which point she left Calcutta and came to the United States. She continued her education in the field of English by receiving a Master’s degree from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

To earn money for her education, she held many odd jobs, including babysitting, selling merchandise in an Indian boutique, slicing bread in a bakery, and washing instruments in a science lab. At Berkeley, she lived in the International House and worked in the dining hall. She briefly lived in Illinois, Ohio and Texas, but has spent most of her life in Northern California, which she often writes about.

Divakaruni currently teaches in the nationally ranked Creative Writing program at the Univ. of Houston. She serves on the Advisory board of Maitri in the San Francisco Bay Area and Daya in Houston. Both these are organizations that help South Asian or South Asian American women who find themselves in abusive or domestic violence situations. She is also on the board of Pratham, an organization that helps educate children (especially those living in urban slums) in India.

Divakaruni has judged several prestigious awards, such as the National Book Award and the PEN Faulkner Award. Two of her books, The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart, have been made into movies by filmmakers Gurinder Chadha and Paul Berges (an English film) and Suhasini Mani Ratnam (a Tamil TV serial) respectively.
Divakaruni lives in Houston with her husband Murthy, her two sons Anand and Abhay (whose names she has used in her children’s novels) and Juno, the family dog.

Much of Divakaruni’s work deals with the immigrant experience, an important theme in the mosaic of American society. Her book Arranged Marriage is a collection of short stories about women from India caught between two worlds. In The Mistress of Spices, the character Tilo provides spices, not only for cooking, but also for the homesickness and alienation that the Indian immigrants in her shop experience. In Sister of My Heart, two cousins—one in America, the other in India, share details of their lives with each other and help each other solve problems that threaten their marriages. Divakaruni writes to unite people. Her aim is to destroy myths and stereotypes. She hopes through her writing to dissolve boundaries between people of different backgrounds, communities, ages, and even different worlds.

Divakaruni’s writing often centers around the lives of immigrant women. She says, “Women in particular respond to my work because I’m writing about them, women in love, in difficulty, women in relationships. I want people to relate to my characters, to feel their joy and pain, because it will be harder to [be] prejudiced when they meet them in real life.” Her interest in women began after she left India, at which point she came to reevaluate the treatment of women there. At Berkeley, she volunteered at a women’s center and became interested in helping battered women. She then started Maitri with a group of friends, which eventually led her to write Arranged Marriage, a work that includes stories about the abuse and courage of immigrant women.

Before she began her career in writing fiction, Divakaruni was an acclaimed poet. She writes poems encompassing a wide variety of themes, and she once again directs much focus to the immigrant experience and to South Asian women. She shows the experiences and struggles involved in women trying to find their own identities. Poems from Divakaruni’s latest collection, Leaving Yuba City, won a Pushcart Prize, an Allen Ginsberg Prize and a Gerbode Foundation award.

www.chitradivakaruni.com