Baps Sidhwa is the author of four internationally acclaimed novels. She lives in Houston, Texas, but was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and raised in Lahore. She graduated from Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore, and began writing in her twenties after the birth of two children.

In 1978, at a time when publishing in English was practically non-existent in Pakistan, Sidhwa self-published her novel The Crow Eaters. Since then, The Crow Eaters has been published and translated in numerous Eurapean and Asian countries.

While The Bride was the first novel Sidhwa wrote, it was the second to be published. Cracking India, Sidhwa's third novel, was declared a New York Times Notable Book for 1991, received the LiBerature Prize in Germany and was nominated by the American Library Association as a Notable Book the same year. An American Brat, Sidhwa's latest book, was published in 1993.

Sidhwa held a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe/Harvard in 1986, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Center, Bellagio, Italy, in 1991. She received the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistan's highest national honor in the arts, in 1991, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award In 1994. Sidhwa has worked on the advisory committee to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on Women's Development, and has taught at Columbia University, University of Houston, and Mount Holyoke College. She was the Fanny Hurst writer-in-residence at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and serves on the Board of Directors of INPRINT in Houston. She will be teaching at South Hampton University, England, 2001.

Cracking India has also been made into the film Earth by director Deepa Mehta. Earth was released in the United States in September 1999 and is currently playing in major cities around the country. Reviewers have praised Bapsi Sidhwa's “luminous prose, Rabelaisian language and humor … [and a style that is] earthy … but … also both delicate and precise … with words chosen as carefully as pieces of inlay in a marble wall.”

Buy her books at croweaters