Bharati Mukherjee, an Indian-born American writer who explored immigrant life in the award-winning collection The Middleman and Other Stories, has passed away. Mukherjee died on Saturday in New York. She was 76.

In an 1989 interview from the Iowa Review and archived on the Iowa Research Online, Mukherjee discusses her work, as well as her time in Iowa City. This interview took place over a two day period just after Thanksgiving, 1989, in Iowa City, where Bharati Mukherjee had come to read from her latest novel, Jasmine, and also to spend the weekend with her husband, Clark Blaise, who was teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and would later become the director of the International Writing Program. The Middleman and Other Stories had recently won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

The cause of her death was complications of rheumatoid arthritis and takotsubo cardiomyopathy, a stress-induced heart condition, her husband and former director of the International Writing Program, Clark Blaise, said.

Links:

NYT: Bharati Mukherjee, Writer of Immigrant Life, Dies at 76 

San Francisco Chronicle: Bharati Mukherjee, chronicler of Indian American life, dies at 76

Image Credit:  RICHARD LAUTENS / TORONTO STAR)