Vauhini Vara was born to Indian immigrants in Saskatchewan, Canada. She grew up there and in Oklahoma and the Seattle suburbs in the USA. She is primarily a journalist who began her writing career as a technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal. She later contributed articles for the business section of the New Yorker’s website. Vara has studied creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She also received the O. Henry Award and has been honored by the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Her work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper’s Businessweek, and Wired. She has won numerous prizes and honors from the Asian American Journalists Association, the International Center for Journalists, the McGraw Center for British Journalism, the International Journalists’ Programmes, and the National Association of Real Estate Editors.