Rabindranath Maharaj was born in George Village in the rural district of Tableland in South Trinidad. He studied at the local school and later at Naparima College in San Fernando. He did his BA (1979), MA (1989), and Diploma in Education (1991) from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. He worked as a schoolteacher for a few years and wrote a column for the Trinidad Sunday Guardian before immigrating to Fredericton in Canada in the early 1990s. In 1993, he completed his second MA in Creative Writing from the University of New Brunswick. He later settled in Ajax, Ontario.