Sujata Massey

Sujata Massey

Sujata Massey is the author of crime fiction, including her award-winning Perveen Mistry and Rei Shimura Mysteries series.

Born in England to parents from India and Germany, Sujata’s family moved to the United States when she was a child. She was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and later moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where she has lived for thirty years.

Sujata studied writing at Johns Hopkins University and earned a B.A. in Writing Seminars. Upon graduating, she wrote features for the Baltimore Evening Sun newspaper before moving to Japan with her husband and teaching English. It was there that she began writing mystery fiction. Her first Rei Shimura mystery novel, The Salaryman’s Wife, won the Agatha Award for best first novel in 1997. Later, Sujata moved back to the States with her husband and two children and began to write the Perveen Mistry series, which was inspired by the first women lawyers in India.

Her novels have been translated into 18 languages and won the Agatha, Lefty, Macavity, and Mary Higgins Clark prizes and been finalists for the Edgar, Anthony, Shamus, and Harper Lee literary awards.

Sujata currently lives with her family in Baltimore.

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Books By Sujata Massey

Convenience Boy and Other Stories of Japan

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Sujata Massey stormed onto the mystery scene with her award-winning debut novel The Salaryman’s Wife starring Rei Shimura, a Japanese American amateur detective solving mysteries in modern-day Japan. She would go on to write eleven Rei novels and several short stories before turning her attention to Perveen Mistry, her popular and acclaimed historical mystery series.

Sujata researched for four years before writing the first Perveen Mistry novel, The Widows of Malabar Hill, which centres around Perveen, the only female lawyer in 1920s Bombay. The books are based on two pioneering Indian women lawyers, Cornelia Sorabji and Mithan Jamshed “Tata” Lam.

“I learned that the first woman lawyer in the British Empire, Cornelia Sorabji, started working as a solicitor in the 1890s,” says Sujata. ”Cornelia wrote wonderful memoirs that detail the close calls she had while trying to represent the interests of women clients during this time period. Making Perveen a solicitor gives her a believable chance to be near crime, intrigue, and death at a time that most women in India were not moving freely throughout society.”

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