Basharat Peer is a Kashmiri journalist, scriptwriter, and author, born in 1977. Peer spent his early youth in the Kashmir Valley before moving to Aligarh and subsequently to Delhi for higher education. In August 2006, he relocated to New York City in the United States, where he currently serves as an opinion-editor at The New York Times.

Peer studied journalism and politics at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has worked as an editor at Foreign Affairs and served as a correspondent at Tehelka, India's leading English language weekly. His work has appeared in The Guardian, New Statesman, The Nation, Financial Times Magazine, N+1, and Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications.

His first book, Curfewed Night, won one of India's top literary awards, the Vodafone Crossword Book Award for English Non-Fiction. Peer is also a Fellow at the Open Society Institute and currently resides in New York.