Widows of Malabar Hill (Massey) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—March 4, 1964
• Where—Sussex, England, UK
• Raised—California, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, USA
• Education—B.A., Johns Hopkins University
• Awards—Agatha Award; Macivity Award
• Currently—lives in Baltimore, Maryland


Sujata Massey was born in England to parents from India and Germany. She immigrated with her family to the United States in the late 1960s, ultimately settling in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in the Writing Seminars from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Maryland.

After college, Sujata spent five years as a features reporter for The Baltimore Evening Sun. She then moved to Japan with her husband, who was serving as a medical officer with the US Navy. Sujata took up the study of Japanese, ikebana and cooking, all the while teaching English and traveling throughout Japan.

In her home in the Yokohama suburbs, she began writing her first mystery novel about Rei Shimura, a young Japanese-American woman in Tokyo. That book, The Salaryman’s Wife won the Agatha Award for Best First Mystery of 1997 and was followe by ten more books that mixed the Japanese cultural arts with murder.

A decade ago, Sujata put Japan on pause to write about India, a country that she has visited with her family since the time she was nine. Her interest especially grew after the adoption of her two children, who were born in Kerala.

Sujata decided to write fiction set in Calcutta during the late colonial period because she was intrigued by the untold stories of the Indians and Europeans who’d once inhabited landmark buildings that were being knocked down so shopping malls and mega apartment towers could go up. (From the publisher.)