Mukherjee Bharati is an Indian-born American Canadian novelist, short story writer, journalist, and a well-known Indian diasporic writer. She was born to Sudhir Lal Mukherjee, a Bengali Brahmin who had earned a doctorate from the University of London, and Bina Banerjee Mukherjee from Dhaka. Mukherjee attended an Anglicized Bengali school from 1944 to 1948. Then, she earned her BA from the University of Calcutta in 1956 and her MA from the University of Baroda in 1961. She moved to the USA, where she earned her MFA and PhD in 1963 and 1969, respectively, from the University of Iowa. In 1966, she moved to Canada, living in Montreal and Toronto. In 1980, she shifted to the United States and taught at Universities in New York and New Jersey. In the late 1980s, she became a US citizen and started teaching Postcolonial and World Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where she retired in 2013.