About her life of writing...

Dipika Mukherjee was born in India and then educated in Switzerland, Indonesia, New Zealand, Malaysia and the USA.

Her debut novel, Thunder Demons, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2009 and she won the Platform Flash Fiction competition in April 2009. Her most recent work has appeared in the Asia Literary Review (Hong Kong), The South Asia Review (USA), Flashquake (USA), Freefall (Canada), Del Sol Review (USA), Pilot Pocket Books (Canada), Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore (Singapore) New Writing Dundee (UK), Asiatic (Malaysia) and Muse India (India). She has edited two anthologies of short stories: Silverfish New Writing 6 (Silverfish, 2006) and The Merlion and Hibiscus (Penguin, 2002).

Her first poetry collection, The Palimpsest of Exile, was published by Rubicon Press (Canada) in April 2009. In May, 2010 her poem "Shanghai Shorts" was a Fish Poetry Prize finalist in Ireland  and she has performed her work at Out Loud! in Shanghai, China; Huis van de Poëzie in Utrecht, Netherlands; The Seksan Reading Series in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Hideout in Austin, Texas; The Sugar Factory, in Amsterdam, Netherlands; and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, among other places.

She lives in Shanghai, China. She is married to Prasanta Kumar Dutt and they have two sons, Arohan and Arush.

And the parallel academic track...

Dr. Dipika Mukherjee has a doctorate in English (Sociolinguistics) from Texas A&M University; her research focuses on the language patterns of diasporic communities.

She is currently Professor 211 at the Institute of Linguistic Studies, Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai.

She is also a Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, Netherlands, where she investigated Negotiating Languages and Forging Identities: Surinamese-Indian Women in the Netherlands.

Her doctoral research explored trans-national issues within a non-western culture, focussing on identity formation, ethnicity, and minority issues relating to gender issues in the Malaysian-Indian (Bengali) community.

Her recent work in Malaysia examines the effect of the national language policy on different migrant groups in Malaysia and her edited book, National Language Planning and Language Shifts in Malaysian Minority Communities was published by the Amsterdam University Press in 2011.

She has taught language and linguistic courses in the Netherlands, United States, Malaysia, and Singapore for the past eighteen years.

Click Here for more on her Nomadic Work History

Click Here for more on her Research Publications