Deborah Baker was born in Charlottesville, Virginia and educated at the University of Virginia and Cambridge.  In 1990 she left New York City, where she had been working as a book editor, and moved to Calcutta for two years.  While there she studied Bengali at the Ramakrishna Mission and wrote a literary biography. In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (Grove, Hamish Hamilton, 1994) was short listed for the Pulitzer Prize. Her articles and essays have appeared in a range of publications, from The New York Times to The Calcutta Statesmen. For the past 18 years she has returned to Calcutta every summer and traveled extensively throughout South Asia. Married to the novelist Amitav Ghosh, she divides her time between homes in Calcutta, Goa and Brooklyn.