Megha Majumdar was born and raised in Kolkata, India, in the late 1980s. In 2006, she went to Harvard University to study social anthropology and then moved to Johns Hopkins University to do her PhD but ended up with a master’s degree. Her move from India, where she had known differences and diversities, to the USA exposed her to a new social environment and her education there to developmental history and politics. Her debut novel A Burning, based on her Indian experiences, was published in 2020 and became a New York Times bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction in 2021 and won the 2022 Whiting Award. Apart from being a novelist, Majumdar is a senior editor for Catapult Books.