Bharati Mukherjee

Novelist Bharati Mukherjee on New Letters on the Air New Letters on the Air interviews Indian-born American author Bharati Mukherjee about her fiction, including her newest book, The Tree Bride. This program uplinked on the Public Radio Satellite on March 23, 2005. In this interview, Mukherjee discusses her novels, which reflect the immigrant experience in the New World, and the shift of focus she takes in her newest novel, The Tree Bride. In this book, the protagonist Tara embarks on an ancestral root search, which has her looking back to the old country rather than ahead in the new. “She is caught in ideas that she has inherited about how time operates or how destiny operates, her gradual Americanization, and her exercising of free will. But, for her, the world is full of magical coincidences,” Mukherjee says. Bharati Mukherjee is the author of seven novels, including Desirable Daughters and Jasmine. Along with her husband and Canadian novelist, Clark Blaise, she wrote an exposé on the Air India Flight 182 crash. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988 for her collection The Middleman and Other Stories as well as a Pushcart Prize in 1999. She holds a B.A. from the University of Calcutta, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop as well as a PhD from the University of Iowa. Mukherjee is currently a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley and lives in San Francisco. New letters on the Air is public radio’s longest-running literary program, and is a production of New Letters, a magazine of new writing, published at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The program is funded in part by the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency. Please note: This piece is an excellent choice for Public Radio Collaboration.