Sunetra Gupta was born in Calcutta in 1965 and wrote her first works of fiction in Bengali. She graduated in 1987 from Princeton University and received her PhD from the University of London in 1992.
She is the author of 6 novels, several short stories and essays, and also an accomplished translator of the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. Her novels have been awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Southern Arts Literature Prize, shortlisted for the Crossword Award, and longlisted for the Orange Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
She lives in Oxford where she is Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford with an interest in malaria, HIV, influenza and bacterial diseases. She has been awarded the the Zoological Society of London Scientific Medal and the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award for her scientific research.