Dinika Amaral was born and raised in Bombay, India. A former banker with JP Morgan Chase & Co., she has an M.A. and M.F.A. from New York University. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Times of India, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Golden Handcuffs Review, Denver Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and in The Iowa Review (awarded the Tim McGinnis prize). She has been awarded residencies and fellowships by: the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, PLAYA, the Napa Valley Writers' Conference, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley (James D. Houston Scholarship), the Ragdale Foundation, and the Steinbeck Fellows Program at San Jose State University.

She lives in the Silicon Valley with her husband and is working on an unlinked story collection, a novel that features birds and gangsters, and a novella based on the Hindu epic poem, the ​Ramayana.