Deborah Baker

For the American actress, see Deborah Baker Jr.

Deborah Baker
Born	Charlottesville
Alma mater	University of Virginia, Cambridge University
Notable awards	Guggenheim Fellowship, Whiting Award
Spouse	Amitav Ghosh

Deborah Baker is an American biographer and essayist.

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 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

References

1. Celia McGee (2008-04-13). "Om Sweet Om". The New York Times. India. Retrieved 2012-11-16.
2. Richard Ellmann. "The Pulitzer Prizes; Biography or Autobiography". Pulitzer.org. Retrieved 2012-11-16.
3. "Featured Articles From the Los Angeles Times". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on July 14, 2009.
4. Adams, Lorraine (2011-05-20). "Book Review - The Convert - By Deborah Baker". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-11-16.
5. wsj.com: "The Last Stand of Winston Churchill" (Baker) 9 Nov 2012
6. "BOOKS: Deborah Baker's "A Blue Hand: The Beats in India"". SAJAforum. 2008-03-21. Retrieved 2012-11-16.
7. "Search Results - John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation". Archived from the original on 2015-04-02. Retrieved 2015-01-16.
8. "2016 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grantee: Deborah Baker". Whiting.org. Archived from the original on 2018-01-25. Retrieved 24 January 2018.

External links

• Official website