Shiraz is Robert Hamburger's sixth book. Among his early works, two were finalists for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award & The Western Writers' Prize for Biography; one book was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show and another won him a New York Foundation of the Arts Award in Creative Nonfiction. His earlier titles include:

• A Passage Through India (Spuyten Duyvil, 1998)
• Two Rooms: The Life of Charles Erskine Scott Wood (University of Nebraska Press, 1998)
• All The Lonely People: Life in a Single Room Occupancy Hotel (Ticknor & Fields, 1983)
• A Stranger in the House (Collier Books, 1978)
• Our Portion of Hell: An oral history of the struggle for civil rights (Links Books, 1973)

Robert Hamburger's first three books have been the subject of an exhibition at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as well as television, radio and theatrical treatments. They formed a loose nonfiction trilogy of studies of race and social injustice in contemporary America, and were praised by the likes of Dr. Kenneth Clark, Robert Coles, and Julian Bond. Hamburger has been a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Paris and in India and Morocco, and has had several residencies at the MacDowell Colony and at the Ossabaw Island Project. He has been the recipient of research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in New York City.