Sharon Maas (born 1951) is a Guyanese-born novelist, who was educated in England, lived in India, and subsequently in Germany and in Sussex, United Kingdom. She is the author of The Sugar Planters Daughter.
Maas was born in Georgetown, Guyana. She came from a prominently political family of Dutch, Amerindian and Afro-Caribbean descent.[1] Her mother was one of Guyana's earliest feminists, human rights activists and consumer advocates;[2] her father was Press Secretary to the Marxist opposition leader and later President of Guyana, Dr Cheddi Jagan.[3]
She was educated in Guyana and England. After leaving school she worked as a trainee reporter with the Guyana Graphic in Georgetown, Guyana. She later wrote feature articles for the Sunday Chronicle as a staff journalist.[4]
In 1973 she travelled overland to India via England, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. After two years in India she moved to Germany, where she married a German. She lived in Germany for over 40 years and in 2018 moved to Ireland.
She has written ten novels to date. Her first three novels, published by HarperCollins, focus substantially on their respective protagonists' coming-of-age experience and struggle to find their own, unique identity and place in life ("Bildungsroman"), and are chiefly set against Indian and Guyanese backgrounds. Her fourth book, Sons of Gods is a retelling of the Mahabharata. In 2014 she signed with the UK digital publisher Bookouture, which re-published Of Marriageable Age in May 2014 and several new works. Peacocks Dancing was republished as The Lost Daughter of India and The Speech of Angels was republished as The Orphan of India. Her work has been translated into German, Spanish, French, Danish, Hungarian and Polish.