Gaiutra Bahadur is a Guyanese-American writer. She is best known for '' Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture,'' which was shortlisted for the

Orwell Prize The Orwell Prize, based at University College London, is a British prize for political writing. The Prize is awarded by The Orwell Foundation, an independent charity (Registered Charity No 1161563, formerly "The Orwell Prize") governed by a boa ...

in 2014.

Early life

Bahadur was born in New Amsterdam,

East Berbice-Corentyne East Berbice-Corentyne (Region 6) is one of ten regions in Guyana covering the whole of the east of the country. It borders the Atlantic Ocean to the north, the Nickerie District and Sipaliwini District of Suriname to the east, Brazil to the so ...

in rural Guyana and emigrated to the United States with her family when she was six years old. She grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey and earned her bachelor's degree, with honors in English Literature, at Yale University and her master's degree in journalism at Columbia University.

Career

Before winning a Nieman Fellowship at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

when she was 32, she was a staff writer for

The Philadelphia Inquirer ''The Philadelphia Inquirer'' is a daily newspaper headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The newspaper's circulation is the largest in both the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley metropolitan region of Southeastern Pennsy ...

and the Austin American-Statesman. In her decade as a daily newspaper reporter, she covered politics, immigration and demographics in Texas, Pennsylvania and New Jersey and spent three months in the spring of 2005, during the Iraq war, as a foreign correspondent in Knight Ridder's Baghdad bureau. Since then, she has worked as an essayist, literary critic and freelance journalist, contributing to

The New York Times Book Review ''The New York Times Book Review'' (''NYTBR'') is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times'' in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely rea ...

, The New York Review of Books,

The Nation ''The Nation'' is an American liberal biweekly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's '' The Liberator'', an abolitionist newspaper t ...

, The New Republic,

Dissent Dissent is an opinion, philosophy or sentiment of non-agreement or opposition to a prevailing idea or policy enforced under the authority of a government, political party or other entity or individual. A dissenting person may be referred to as ...

and other publications. Her book ''

Coolie Woman ''Coolie Woman'' (full title: ''Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture'') is a book written by Gaiutra Bahadur and co-published in 2013 by Hurst and Company of London in Europe and the University of Chicago Press in the US. Editions from Hachette ...

'' was published in 2013. It is partly a narrative history of indentured women in the Caribbean and partly a family history focusing on her great-grandmother, Sujaria, who left Calcutta for British Guiana in 1903 to work as an indentured plantation labourer. The book was a finalist for the 2014

and the Center for Documentary Studies Writing Prize at Duke University, and it won the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Award for Prose and Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize.

The Chronicle of Higher Education ''The Chronicle of Higher Education'' is a newspaper and website that presents news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty and student affairs professionals (staff members and administrators). A subscription is required to re ...

included the book in its round-up of the best scholarly books of the decade in 2020. She collaborated with poet and translator Rajiv Mohabir to recover the only known text by an indentured immigrant in the Anglophone Caribbean, a songbook by Lal Bihari Sharma first published as a pamphlet in India in 1915. Mohabir's English translation, ''I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara'', was published in 2019 with an afterword by Bahadur, who first encountered the text in the British Library while doing research for ''Coolie Woman''. She is an associate professor of journalism at Rutgers University-Newark and has taught creative nonfiction at the University of Basel in Switzerland and Caribbean literature at City College of New York.

Bibliography

Books * * Afterwords * Afterword to * Afterword to Anthologies ''Nonfiction'' * In * In * In * In ''Fiction'' * In Notable Articles and Essays * * * Various articles for

The New Republic ''The New Republic'' is an American magazine of commentary on politics, contemporary culture, and the arts. Founded in 1914 by several leaders of the progressive movement, it attempted to find a balance between "a liberalism centered in hu ...

The New York Review of Books ''The New York Review of Books'' (or ''NYREV'' or ''NYRB'') is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs. Published in New York City, it is inspired by the idea that the discussion of i ...

Dissent (American magazine) ''Dissent'' is an American Left intellectual magazine edited by Natasha Lewis and Timothy Shenk and founded in 1954. The magazine is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social ...

The Virginia Quarterly Review The ''Virginia Quarterly Review'' is a quarterly literary magazine that was established in 1925 by James Southall Wilson, at the request of University of Virginia president E. A. Alderman. This ''"National Journal of Literature and Discussion" ...

Major Awards and Recognition

*2018 Literary Arts Residency, Bellagio Center in Italy, The Rockefeller Foundation *2018 Scholar-in-Residence, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library *2016-2017 Fellow, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University *2015 MacDowell Artists Colony Residency *2014

(shortlist), ''Coolie Woman'' *2014 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (nonfiction shortlist), ''Coolie Woman'' *Two-time winner of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Award for Prose, 2013 and 2019 *2007-2008 Nieman Fellow, Harvard University

References

External links

"Coolie Woman Rescues Indentured Women From Anonymity": National Public Radio

"Salvaged Crossings”: Lauren Alleyne interviews Gaiutra Bahadur, Guernica

"A Conversation with author Gaiutra Bahadur": India Ink Blog, The New York Times

"Paperback Writer – Gaiutra Bahadur": The Guardian

"Gaiutra Bahadur Interview with BBC Woman's Hour": BBC Radio Four

"Coolitude Poetics": Rajiv Mohabir interviews Gaiutra Bahadur, Jacket 2
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bahadur, Gaiutra 1975 births Living people Guyanese women writers Yale College alumni Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism alumni 20th-century Guyanese writers 21st-century Guyanese writers 20th-century American women writers 21st-century American women writers People from New Amsterdam, Guyana Guyanese people of Indian descent American people of Indo-Guyanese descent American women writers of Indian descent