| Sujata Massey | |
| Birth Date: | 4 March 1964 |
| Birth Place: | Sussex, England, United Kingdom |
| Occupation: | Writer |
| Nationality: | British and American |
| Education: | Johns Hopkins University (BA) |
| Genre: | Mystery |
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| Subjects: | --> |
| Notablework: | --> |
| Spouses: | --> |
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Sujata Massey (born March 4, 1964) is an American mystery author and historical fiction novelist. Her books are published in English in the US and Canada, the United Kingdom and India, and Australia/New Zealand. Massey’s novels are also available in different languages and formats in Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain and Thailand.
The author’s debut novel, The Salaryman’s Wife, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel in 1997. In 2000, her novel The Flower Master won the Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel. In 2019, her first Perveen Mistry novel, The Widows of Malabar Hill, won the Mary Higgins Clark Award, as well the Left Coast Crime Convention’s Bruce Alexander Memorial Award for Best Historical Mystery, the Macavity's Sue Feder Memorial Award for Best Historical Mystery, and the Agatha Award for Best Historical Novel. It was selected as Publishers Weeklys Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2018 and was also an Amazon Best Book of 2018.
In 2020, The Widows of Malabar Hill was optioned for development as a television series by the Village Road Show Entertainment Group.
The second Perveen Mistry novel, The Satapur Moonstone, won a Bruce Alexander Memorial Award and was also a finalist for both the Sue Grafton Memorial Award and the Harper Lee Legal Fiction Prize.
Massey was born in 1964 in Sussex, England to a father from India and mother from Germany.[1] She emigrated with her family to the United States at the age of five and grew up in St. Paul Minnesota. At 18, she moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where she studied at Johns Hopkins University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in the Writing Seminars in 1986. She next worked at the Baltimore Evening Sun newspaper, leaving the paper in 1991 to move to Japan for two years. In Japan, she worked as an English teacher and studied Japanese, flower arranging, and cooking.
Ms. Massey returned to the United States in 1993 and began a new career in 1997, when her first book, The Salaryman’s Wife, was published by HarperCollins US. This series of 11 books features a biracial heroine, Rei Shimura,[2] and deals with social issues and the rich artistic heritage of Japan. The most recent Rei Shimura novel is The Kizuna Coast, set in tsunami-ravaged Tohoku.
In the late 1990s through 2020, Massey traveled frequently to India and became intrigued with the history of Indian women in late British colonial India. In 2013, she released a standalone mystery novel titled The Sleeping Dictionary[3] set in British India between 1930 and 1947. In this novel, a 10-year-old peasant girl, Pom, orphaned by a cyclone, undertakes an odyssey through colonial Bengal that leads her into an adult life as a freedom fighter. In India, the same book is titled City of Palaces.
Massey continues to explore early 20th century India with her best-known work, a legal mystery series set in 1920s Bombay.[4] It starts with a first novel, The Widows of Malabar Hill, that centers on a young female Parsi woman lawyer who battles discrimination in her own career and in the lives of women and children she assists. The book’s protagonist, Perveen Mistry, was partially inspired by India’s first two trailblazing women lawyers, the solicitor Cornelia Sorabji and the barrister Mithan Jamshed Lam.
In the second book, The Satapur Moonstone, Perveen solves a mystery in the fictional princely state of Satapur. The third book, The Bombay Prince, to be published in June 2021, has Perveen investigating the death of a young Indian woman during the Prince of Wales riots that occurred in Bombay in November 1921. A prequel novella featuring Perveen Mistry is entitled "Outnumbered at Oxford” and presents a short mystery that occurs during her student years in England.
Short fiction featuring Perveen Mistry
The Perveen Mistry novels were published in audio by Recorded Books for distribution in the United States and Canada, and published by other companies as audiobooks in India, France and Finland.
Short fiction Featuring Rei Shimura
The Salaryman’s Wife, Zen Attitude and The Flower Master were published as audiobooks by Tantor Media for distribution in the United States and Canada.