Rituparna Chatterjee

Rituparna Chatterjee is an award-winning and bestselling author, journalist and columnist. She is a former foreign correspondent and columnist for The Economic Times and The Times of India. Her long standing column of many years, ‘Californi Dreaming’, on her life as a global Indian was first published in The Economic Times and later moved to The Times of India. A hallmark of Chatterjee’s journalism and the books it inspires is using her life as a blank canvas to allow others to tell their stories. And consequently, using unique insider and outsider perspectives to make sense of daily life, technology, politics, gender, mental health and love, in the world’s largest democracies, India and the USA, for the world.
Apart from children’s stories published in various anthologies, Chatterjee’s published books include An Ordinary Life, on the life of a movie star, and the deeply moving The Water Phoenix, a magical realism memoir on an abused child’s lifelong journey to understand what was love and what wasn’t. The Water Phoenix won the United Nations’ Laadli Award for Gender Sensitivity for Best Book Nonfiction (2021) and was in the top five bestselling nonfiction of 2020 and number one on Google India. The book received rave media reviews: India Today called it “vivid and brave”, The Times of India called Chatterjee “courage personified”, Outlook called it “brilliant...a new movement in literature,” Mumbai Mirror said “Devastating...deliberately and lovingly written...Chatterjee can write beautifully and vividly.” Nikkei Asia Review said “(the book was) brave, benefitting the many children (over 1 billion) who are still suffering in unknowing silence.”

Chatterjee spent the following four years conducting hundreds of interviews and research across the world’s largest democracy for her third book How India Loves. And its sequel How India Spends.

Chatterjee divides her life between her homes in California and New Delhi, India.