Sujatha Gidla was born in a Dalit family in Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh, India. Her great-grandparents had converted to Christianity during the British colonial rule. Her grandfather studied in a school run by Canadian missionaries, and her parents worked as college professors. Gidla studied in a local school and a government college and later pursued her master’s in physics at the Regional Engineering College of Warangal within her home state. During this time, she joined an active protest against a faculty member practicing caste discrimination and was the only woman to do so. She was taken away to an undisclosed prison where she was tortured and contracted tuberculosis. Later, she worked as a researcher at the premier Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (now Chennai) on a project funded by the Indian Space Research organization. She moved to the United States when she was 26; for 10 years, she worked as a software application designer at the Bank of New York before losing her job in the financial downturn of 2009. She published her first book, Ants Among Elephants, in the USA. It was chosen as one of the Wall Street Journal’s Top 10 Nonfiction Books 2017 and won the Shakti Bhatt Award. Gidla’s writing has appeared in The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing.