Deborah Baker is a biographer and essayist. She is married to the writer Amitav Ghosh and lives in Brooklyn, Calcutta, and Goa. She is the author of A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, a biography on Allen Ginsberg which focuses on his time in India and of Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 1994. She also writes for the Los Angeles Times. Her latest book, The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (2011), is a biography of Maryam Jameelah (born Margaret Marcus) a Jewish woman from New York who converts to Islam and becomes a fundamentalist writer based in Pakistan.