Sharon Maas (born Georgetown, Guyana, 1951) comes from a prominently political family: Her mother was one of Guyana's earliest feminists, human rights activists and consumer advocates; her father was Press Secretary to the Marxist opposition leader and later President of Guyana, Dr Cheddi Jagan. Both her parents received the country's highest honours for public service, the Golden Arrow.

She was educated in Guyana and England. After leaving school she worked as a journalist with the Guyana Graphic and the Sunday Chronicle in Georgetown, Guyana. She spent 1971 and 1972 travelling around Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. Her travel articles were published in the Chronicle. In 1973 she travelled overland to India via England, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. After two years in India she moved to Germany. She now divides her time between England and Germany with her husband and two children.

Her first three novels and her fifth novel – Of Marriageable Age, Peacocks Dancing, The Speech of Angels, and The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q. – 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, though other countries (most notably Great Britain and Germany) feature prominently as well. Her fourth book, Sons of Gods (published under the pen name Aruna Sharan) is a retelling of the Mahabharata. Her work has been translated into German, Spanish, French, Danish and Polish.