Sujata Massey was born in England to parents from India and Germany. She grew up mostly in the United States (California, Pennsylvania and Minnesota) and earned her BA from the Johns Hopkins University's Writing Seminars program. After that she worked as a reporter at the Baltimore Evening Sun newspaper before marrying and moving to Japan. The area where Sujata once lived, an hour south of Tokyo, forms most of the settings of her Rei Shimura mysteries. The series has collected many mystery award nominations, including the Edgar, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark awards, and has won the Agatha and Macavity prizes for traditional mystery fiction. The Rei Shimura mysteries are published in 18 countries, and an audiobook of one of these books, The Typhoon Lover, is also available. The first book in the series is The Salaryman's Wife, and the tenth is Shimura Trouble. In 2013, Sujata began a new series of a novels set in India. This series, Daughters of Bengal, kicks off with The Sleeping Dictionary, to be published as a trade paperback Aug 20, 2013 by Simon and Schuster. It's a historic espionage novel set in 1930s-40s Calcutta told from a young Bengali woman's point of view. Dreamworks is producing an audiobook of the novel, and the book will be released by different publishers in India, Italy and Turkey. Sujata lives with her family near Washington DC, where she continues to write more Rei Shimura and Daughters of Bengal books.