Sohaila Abdulali was born in Bombay, India, in 1963. She did her schooling in India, and moved to the United States with her family when she was 15. Since then, she has lived in both countries. She got her BA from Brandeis University in Economics and Sociology, and wrote her thesis on the socio-economics of rape in India. When she was eighteen, she wrote an explosive article on the subject in an Indian magazine that won her notoriety for years. After coordinating the biggest, oldest rape crisis centre in the Northeast for two years, she got her Masters in Communication at Stanford University.

She worked as a journalist in Philadelphia, Boston and Bombay. She also began her fiction career, and, to support her writing, she did various odd jobs, from working in an independent bookstore, working with mentally ill adults, to doing sleep research in a psychiatric hospital. She moved to Delhi, India, for two years, where she coordinated publicity and publications for Oxfam. She traveled all over India and England, writing, speaking and producing reports, brochures and a film. Back in Bombay, she did freelance writing and research for the Ford Foundation, Oxfam, and the London School of Tropical Hygiene. In 1998, her bestselling novel, The Madwoman of Jogare, was published by HarperCollins India.

In New York, from 1996 on, she worked as a freelance editor for several UN organizations, as well as private companies. She has edited books on computer systems in health care, human rights movements, and hedge funds. She ghostwrote two articles for Wall Street publications. She has produced reports for The Micronutrent Initiative, and worked as a proofreader for a busy advertising agency.

During this time, she has had two Ford Foundation grants. The first was to research, produce and distribute three children's books on women's health in India. The results, the RangBibi and Langra series, were sold all over India in four languages. The second grant was to write a book about aboriginal people in Western India. The book is called Bye Bye Mati:  A Memoir in a Monsoon Landscape. 

Sohaila has done a lot of public speaking and teaching. In Boston, she spoke at hospitals, schools and many other institutions about sexual assault. When she worked for Oxfam, she spoke in public about issues such as poverty and women's rights. She has appeared on broadcast television in the US, India and on the BBC in England. She was a guest speaker at Clark University in Massachusetts, Northwestern University in Chicago, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, among others.

In 2004, she was an adjunct professor at New York University, teaching South Asian Civilization to undergraduates. Her curriculum was based on her latest book, Bye Bye Mati:  A Memoir in a Monsoon Landscape.

Sohaila's writing has been published in India, the US, England and Canada. She is on the boards of two non-profit organizations: the Center for New Words in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Point of View, a women's media group in Bombay, India. She continues to write and publish both fiction and non-fiction. She lives in the Lower East Side of New York with her husband, neon artist Tom Unger, and their daughter, Samara.