BIO

Short bio:

Chitra Divakaruni is an award-winning writer, activist, professor and speaker, and the author of 21 books such as Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, Before We Visit the Goddess, Palace of Illusions, The Forest of Enchantments, and The Last Queen.  Her newest novel, Independence, depicts the experiences of three sisters in strife-torn Calcutta as India frees itself from the British yoke and received a 2024 American Book Award. She writes for adults and children.

Her work has been published in over 100 magazines and anthologies, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker,The Best American Short Stories and the O.Henry Prize Stories, and translated into 30 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali, Hungarian, Turkish, Hindi and Japanese. Her work been made into films, plays and dance dramas, and performed as operas. Her awards include an American Book Award, a PEN Josephine Miles award, a Premio Scanno, and a Light of India award. In 2015 The Economic Times included her in their List of 20 Most Influential Global Indian Women. She is the McDavid professor of Creative Writing in the internationally acclaimed Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and lives in Houston with her husband Murthy.

Divakaruni has been an activist in the fields of education and domestic violence and has been closely associated with the following nonprofits: Pratham, which educates underprivileged children in India, Akshaya Patra, which feeds Indian schoolchildren, and Daya and Maitri, which assist survivors of domestic violence in starting life anew. She also supports the Houston Food Bank.

 Longer Bio:

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author, poet, activist and teacher. She is the author of 21 books including Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, Oleander Girl, Before We Visit the Goddess and Palace of Illusions. Her latest novels are The Forest of Enchantments, a feminist retelling of the epic The Ramayana in the voice of Sita, and The Last Queen, the story of Maharani Jindan, the indomitable queen regent of Punjab who fought the British in many ingenious ways.  Her newest novel, Independence, depicts the experiences of three sisters in strife-torn Calcutta as India frees itself from the British yoke. Divakaruni often writes about contemporary life in America and India, women’s experiences, immigration, history, magical realism and mythology. She writes for adults and children.

Her work has been published in over 100 magazines and anthologies, including the Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Vogue, Verve, Elle, Oprah’s O magazine, Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and O Henry Prize Stories. Her books have been translated into 29 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali, Hungarian, Turkish, Hindi and Japanese, and have been bestsellers nationally and internationally.

Her awards include, among others, an American Book Award, a PEN Josephine Miles award, a Premio Scanno (also known as the Italian Nobel) award, a Light of India award, a SALA award, 2 Pushcart prizes, an Allen Ginsberg poetry award, a Rona Jaffe Award, a Barbara Deming Memorial Award, and a Houston Literary Award. In 2022, The Last Queen received the Times of India Best Fiction Award and the Best Book Award from The International Association of Working Women.

In 2015 Divakaruni was included in the Economic Times’ List of 20 Most Influential Global Indian Women. She has judged several prestigious awards such as the National Book Award and the PEN Faulkner Award.

Two books, The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart, have been made into movies. Several others are under option in Hollywood and in India.  Her short story “The Word Love,” was made into an award-winning short film, Amaar Ma. Arranged Marriage has been made into a play and performed in both USA and Canada. Palace of Illusions has been performed on the stage in USA and India. Mistress of Spices is in the process of being made into an opera.

Her novel One Amazing Thing has been chosen as a city-wide or campus-wide read in over 35 cities and institutions across the U.S.  

She wrote the libretto for the opera River of Light, which has been performed by the Houston Grand Opera and Festival Opera in the San Francisco area.

Divakaruni teaches in the nationally ranked Creative Writing program at the University of Houston, where she is the McDavid Professor of Creative Writing. Several of her students have gone on to publish acclaimed books and have won awards. She is regularly asked to be an outside reviewer for the tenure/promotion of professors in Creative Writing programs in universities across the US.

She serves on the Advisory Board of Maitri in the San Francisco Bay Area and of Daya in Houston, both organizations that help survivors of domestic abuse and trafficking. (She was a co-founder of Maitri). She serves on the Emeritus Board of Pratham, a literacy organization that works with underprivileged children and provides job-training and small business start-up seed money for women in India. She supports Akshaya Patra, which feeds Indian schoolchildren, and the Houston Food Bank. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband, Murthy.   

AGENTS: To request an in-person or virtual speaking engagement in the U.S., please contact Christie Hinrichs, or view Divakaruni’s SPEAKING PROFILE. To request an in-person or virtual speaking engagement, or for film options in India, contact Sidharth Jain, s@thestoryink.com. Divakaruni’s literary agency is The Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. Contact: elise@dijkstraagency.com. For U.S. film options, contact andrea@dijkstraagency.com.