Gaiutra Bahadur

Gaiutra Bahadur
Born	1975 New Amsterdam, Guyana
Occupation	Writer and journalist
Language	English
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Yale University
Notable work	Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture

Gaiutra Bahadur is an award-winning Guyanese-American writer. She is best known for Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2014.^[1]

Early life

Bahadur was born in rural Guyana and emigrated to the US when she was six years old.^[2][3] 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 when she was 32, she was a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Austin American-Statesman. She has worked as an essayist, literary critic and freelance journalist, contributing to The New York Times Book Review, Lapham's Quarterly, Dissent, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Ms. Magazine and other publications.^[2]

Her book Coolie Woman 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.^[4] The book was a finalist for the 2014 Orwell Prize and won the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize.^[5]

Bibliography

Books

• Coolie Woman. University of Chicago Press. 2013. ISBN 978-0226034423. Co-published by C. Hurst & Co in the UK, Hachette in India and Jacana in South Africa
• Family Ties. Scholastic. 2012. ISBN 978-0531225547.

Anthologies

Nonfiction

• "Tales of the Sea". In We Mark Your Memory: Writing from the Descendants of Indenture. The University of London. 2018. ISBN 978-1912250073.
• "Of Islands and Other Mothers". In Nonstop Metropolis. University of California Press. 2016. ISBN 978-0520285958.
• "Ogling the Statue of Liberty". In Living on the Edge of the World. Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. 2007. ISBN 978-0743291606.

Fiction

• "The Stained Veil". In Go Home!. Feminist Press. 2018. ISBN 978-1936932016. ^[6]

Select Articles and Essays

• Gaiutra Bahadur (May 8, 2018). "Masters and Servants". The Boston Review.
• Gaiutra Bahadur (March 20, 2018). "Rescued From the Footnotes of History". Los Angeles Review of Books.
• Gaiutra Bahadur (August 16, 2016). "A Good Story, if I Can Remember It". Lapham's Quarterly.
• Gaiutra Bahadur at The New York Times Book Review
• Gaiutra Bahadur at Dissent (American magazine)
• Gaiutra Bahadur at The Virginia Quarterly Review
• Gaiutra Bahadur at The Nation

Awards and Recognition

• Fall 2018 Scholar in Residence, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library
• 2018 Literary Arts Residency, Bellagio Center, The Rockefeller Foundation^[7]
• 2016-2017 Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow, Hutchins Center, Harvard University^[8]
• 2016 MacDowell Artists Colony Residency^[9]
• 2016 Visiting U.S. Fellow, The Eccles Centre for American Studies, The British Library^[10]
• 2015 Elizabeth Longford Award for Historical Biography, The British Society of Authors^[11]
• 2014 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize, Coolie Woman^[12]
• 2014 Orwell Prize (shortlist), Coolie Woman^[1]
• 2014 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (nonfiction shortlist), Coolie Woman^[13]
• 2013 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship^[14]
• 2012 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award^[15]
• 2007-2008 Nieman Fellow, Harvard University^[16]

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Gaiutra Bahadur.

• "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*

References