Biography

Amitav Ghosh & Deborah Baker
Deborah Baker
Deborah Baker was born in Charlottesville and grew up in Virginia, Puerto Rico and New England.  She attended the University of Virginia and Cambridge University.  Her first book, written in college, was Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly, published by Beacon Press in 1982. 
 
After working as a book editor and publisher, in 1990 she moved to Calcutta where she wrote In Extremis; The Life of Laura Riding.  Published by Grove Press and Hamish Hamilton in the UK, it was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1994.  Her third book, A Blue Hand: The Beats in India was published by Penguin Press USA and Penguin India in 2008.
 
In 2008–2009 she was a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis C. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at The New York Public Library.  There she researched and wrote The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, a narrative account of the life of an American convert to Islam. Published by Graywolf and Penguin India, The Convert was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in Non-Fiction.
 
The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire was published in October 2018. For this book  she received a Whiting Creative Non-fiction grant and a Guggenheim fellowship.
 
Charlottesville is her sixth work of narrative non-fiction.
 
She is married to the writer Amitav Ghosh and lives in Brooklyn and Charlottesville.