Deborah Baker
American biographer and essayist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Deborah Baker is an American biographer and essayist. She was born on March 28, 1959, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Cambridge University
Whiting Award
Deborah Baker | |
|---|---|
| |
| Born | March 28, 1959 Charlottesville, Virginia |
| Alma mater | University of Virginia, Cambridge University |
| Notable awards | Guggenheim Fellowship, Whiting Award |
| Spouse | Amitav Ghosh |
She is the author of A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, a biography of Allen Ginsberg that focuses on his time in India[1] and of In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 1994.[2] She also writes for the Los Angeles Times.[failed verification][3] 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.[4] In 2012, she wrote a critical review for The Wall Street Journal of Defender of the Realm, the Manchester-Reid biography of Winston Churchill.[5]
Family
She is married to the Indian Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh and lives in Brooklyn, Calcutta, and Goa.[6]
Awards
Baker was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.[7]
In 2016, she was awarded a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to complete her book, The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire.[8]
Works
- Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly; Charlottesville, Va., 1981. OCLC 909398434
- In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding; New York : Grove Weidenfeld, 1992. ISBN 9780802113641, OCLC 213341906
- A Blue Hand: The Beats in India; New York : Penguin Press, 2008. ISBN 9781594201585, OCLC 239110990
- The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism. Saint Paul, Minn. : Graywolf, 2013. ISBN 9781555976279, OCLC 822959870
- The Last Englishmen, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, 2018. ISBN 9781555978044, OCLC 1002562236
- Charlottesville: An American Story, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, 2025. ISBN 9781644453414
