Tanya Mendonsa was educated at Loreto school and college in Calcutta. After spending twenty years in Paris, studying French literature at the Sorbonne, painting and running a language school, she returned to India, a story told in her memoir The Book of Joshua. Her first collection of poetry, The Dreaming House, ranged effortlessly in theme, maintaining a startling clarity of vision and language. Her poems have been widely anthologized. She currently lives in the blue mountains of the Nilgiris with the abstract painter Antonio E Costa.