Sunetra Gupta was born in Calcutta, India, on 15 March 1965 and spent her childhood in Ethiopia and Zambia. She returned to Calcutta as a teenager and began writing, encouraged by her father who introduced her to the work of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. She studied biology at the University of Princeton and has a Ph.D. from the University of London. She is a Reader in Epidemiology at Oxford University.
She is the author of four novels, Memories of Rain (1992), originally inspired by Brendan Kenelly's adaptation of Medea; The Glassblower's Breath (1993), about a single day in the lives of a butcher, a baker and a candle maker and the women they all love, set in Calcutta, New York and London; Moonlight into Marzipan (1995), the story of a remarkable discovery made in a crumbling garage laboratory in Calcutta; and A Sin of Colour (1999), which narrates the history of three generations of a wealthy Indian family from Calcutta. A Sin of Colour won the Southern Arts Literature Prize.
Sunetra Gupta lives in Oxford with her husband and two daughters.
