Jason Grunebaum visited India on a Fulbright and worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross as an interpreter visiting detainees in Kashmir, and later as a delegate in Kosovo and East Timor, working on behalf of families of the missing. He received his MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, and is now a lecturer in Hindi in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, where he continues to write fiction and translate.

In 2005 he was awarded a PEN Translation Fund Grant to translate Uday Prakash’s Hindi novella The Girl with the Golden Parasol, an excerpt of which was published in the University of Iowa’s eXchanges. He has been invited to read from the novella during the 2006 PEN World Voices Festival in held in New York City.