A.R. VENKATACHALAPATHY, Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, has taught at universities in Tirunelveli, Chennai, Singapore and Chicago. Apart from the V.K.R.V. Rao Prize (History, 2007), he has received the Vilakku Pudumaippithan Award (2018) and Iyal Virudhu (2021), both for lifetime contribution to Tamil. He has published widely on the social, cultural and intellectual history of colonial Tamil Nadu. Apart from his scholarly writings in English, he has written/edited over 30 books in Tamil. His publications in English include The Brief History of a Very Big Book: The Making of the Tamil Encyclopaedia, Tamil Characters: Personalities, Politics, Culture; Who Owns That Song?: The Battle for Subramania Bharati’s Copyright; The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes, and Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu; In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History. Presently he is working on biographies of Periyar and V.O. Chidambaram Pillai.
Adrian Levy is a former staff writer and foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times, and the Guardian. Along with Cathy Scott-Clark, he won the One World award for foreign reporting and was Press Journalist of the Year. Their third book, Deception (2008), was a Washington Post Book of the Year, and finalist in the Royal United Services Institute, Duke of Westminster’s medal for Military History. The Meadow (2012), won the Ramnath Goenka Award. The Siege (2014) won the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction. The Exile was published in May. They have produced documentaries for HBO, PBS, BBC 1, BBC 2, C4.
Akash Kapur is an author and journalist who lives in Auroville, India. His work has appeared, among other places, in The Atlantic, Granta, The Hindu, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Outlook. He is the author of India Becoming: Journey Through a Changing Landscape (Penguin 2012) and editor of Auroville: Dream and Reality (Penguin 2017), an anthology of writing from Auroville. He is at work on a book on the quest for utopia, set in Auroville.
Akhila Krishnamurthy, a journalist and arts entreprenuer based in Chennai heads the brand events of The Hindu. She was a freelance journalist and an arts entrepreneur based in Chennai. As a journalist, Akhila has worked as a features writer and Editor for The Times of India, and the India Today Group. She has also written extensively on arts and culture for leading publications in India that include the New Indian Express, Outlook, Tehelka, Harper’s Bazaar, and the National Geographic Traveller India. In 2012, Akhila founded Aalaap, a one-of-a-kind arts’ initiative in Chennai that works with performing artistes across India and the world on aspects of ideation, curation, production, promotions and design. In 2013, Aalaap won the Original Idea of the Year award from Femina. In 2017, at the Startupreneurs conference organised by the CII, Tamilnadu Chapter, Akhila won the Woman Entrepreneur of the Year Award. She currently heads the brand events of The Hindu.
AMITAVA KUMAR is the author of several works of non-fiction and a novel. His writing has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, The Hindu, The Guardian, Bookforum, The Nation, The New York Times, Guernica, Caravan, and other publications. He is the Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College in upstate New York. His website is www.amitavakumar.com and is on Twitter @amitavakumar.
Ammu Joseph is an independent journalist and author based in Bangalore, writing primarily on issues relating to gender, human development and the media. Among her publications are Whose News?: The Media and Women’s Issues (1994/2006); Making News: Women in Journalism (2000/2005); Storylines: Conversations with Women Writers (2003); Just Between Us: Women Speak about their Writing (2004); Interior Decoration: Anthology of Poems by Indian Women (2010); and Terror, Counter-Terror: Women Speak Out (2003). She has contributed chapters to several other books; among them, most recently, Missing Half the Story: Journalism as if Gender Matters (2010); the IFJ-WACC Learning Resource Kit to Strengthen Gender-Ethical Journalism (2012); The Palgrave International Handbook of Women and Journalism (2013), UNESCO’s World Trends in the State of Freedom of Expression and Media Development (2013) and UNESCO-IAMCR’s Media and Gender: A Scholarly Agenda for the Global Alliance on Media and Gender (2014).
Ananya Vajpeyi is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge University.
Anita Thampi is a Malayalam poet and translator living in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. She has published three collections of poetry: Muttamatikkumpol (While Sweeping the Front Yard, 2004), Azhakillaathavayellam (All That are Bereft of Beauty, 2010), and Alappuzha Vellam (Alappuzha Water, 2016). In 2007, a collection of her translations of Australian poet Les Murray was published in a bilingual edition. She has also translated I Saw Ramallah, an autobiographical monologue of Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, into Malayalam. Her other translated works include the Spanish classic Platero and I and the Italian classic Pinocchio.
Anu Majumdar was born in Allahabad. Discovering Sri Aurobindo while in college in Kolkata was a life-changing experience which led her to Auroville in 1979. She has worked in different areas such as the Matrimandir construction site and as a dancer-choreographer with the Auroville Dance Lab. At present her interest lies in city planning as a means to enable Auroville further. Her books include Refugees from Paradise & God Enchanter, (fiction), Island of Infinity & Infinity Papers (YA), as well as two collections of poetry. Auroville: A City for the Future is her first non-fiction book.
“Anushka Ravishankar is an iconic children’s writer. She has written over 15 books of verse, fiction and non-fiction. many of which have been published internationally. A majority of these are nonsense or absurd verse, a genre she is particularly attached to Some of her books are I Like Cats, Elephants Never Forget, The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Non-sense and Wish You Were Here. Apart from children’s books, she also writes plays for both children and adults and has many international awards to her credit. “
Arimalam S Padmanabhan (Dr) is a musicologist, musician, composer, folklorist, author and orator. He is a former Fellow, Central Institute of Classical Tamil; a former Guest Faculty at the School of Performing Arts, Pondicherry University; a Residential Fellow at the Pondicherry Institute of Linguistics and Culture; and Visiting Professor at the Department of Music, University of Madras. With over 25 years of research experience in Tamil music, musical theatre and folk arts, he is the author of seven books and several research articles. He is also a vocalist and an auditioned artiste (MAB) of All India Radio since 1979. His Mariammai Kaviyam is a compilation of Christian poetry composed in the Tamil Pann tradition. As a teacher-educator he has conducted workshops and training programmes in group singing, choir singing and mass singing. He has composed music for documentary films, dance, dance dramas and television programmes. His awards include the Kalaimamani (Government of Puducherry).
Arshia Sattar works with classical Indian literatures and the story traditions of the sub-continent. She is a translator, teacher and book critic. Her translations from Sanskrit of the Kathasaritsagara and the Valmiki Ramayana have been published as Penguin Classics. Along with DW Gibson, Arshia founded and runs the Sangam House International Writers’ Residency Programme outside Bangalore. (www.sangamhouse.org)
Arundhathi Nag, the Creative Director of Rangashankara, Bengaluru, is an actor in theatre and cinema and advisor on several national institutions. She has performed in over 1000 shows in five langauges in both amateur and professional theatre. From Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett to Karnad and Tendulkar, she has performed in a variety of genres. She acted in India’s first TV serial Haji Avi Kaal Che. She was Assistant Director to David Lean for Passage to India and assisted in and wrote the dialogues for the TV serial Malgudi Days. Her awards include the Padma Shri and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award.
AS Paneerselvan is the Readers’ Editor of The Hindu, an independent internal news ombudsman functioning with clearly formulated Terms of Reference. Apart from being a regular columnist, he is also a journalism teacher and is an adjunct faculty of the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. He is a member of the governing body of the KM Adimoolam Foundation for Arts in Chennai and an editorial advisor for the long-form magazine, The Little Magazine. He has directed a documentary film, Making Trouble Where There Is None, for Frontline magazine about communal mobilisation under the cover of the Lord Ganesh festival in Chennai. He was a Reuters Fellow at the University of Oxford. He has lectured widely in the UK , the United States of America and Europe.
“Bama Faustina is a pioneering Dalit novelist from Tamil Nadu. Her first novel Karukku is not only the first autobiographical work of its kind written in the dialect of her community, but also broke new ground in both fiction writing as well as in the use of language in fiction. Karukku has won several awards and has been translated into many languages. Bama has subsequently written two more novels, Sangathi and Vanmam and two collections of short stories, Kusumbukkaran and Oru Tattavum Erumaiyum. One of the first Dalit women writers to be widely recognized and translated, Bama is a school teacher in Uthiramerur. “
Baradwaj Rangan is a film critic. He won the National Award (Swarna Kamal) for Best Film Critic of 2005. His writings on cinema, music, art, books, travel and humour have been published in various national magazines like Open, Tehelka, Biblio, Outlook and Caravan. He has co-written the screenplay for the Tamil rom-com Kadhal 2 Kalyanam. He teaches a course on cinema at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. He has contributed to various anthologies, the most recent being an essay in Subramaniyapuram: The Tamil Film in English Translation. His first book, Conversations with Mani Ratnam, was published in 2012 and his second, Dispatches from the Wall Corner, in October 2014.
Challapalli Swarupa Rani is a well-known Dalit poet based in Vijaywada. A professor at the Centre for Mahayana Buddhist Studies at the Acharya Nagarjuna University, Guntur, she has around 100 publications to her credit. Her works include Asthitvagaanam; Caste, Religion and State in Medieval South India; Tribe- Peasant- Elite Dynamics in Medieval Andhra; Facets of Gender Discrimination and Violence and a book of poems Mankenapuvvu.
CHANDAN GOWDA is Ramakrishna Hegde Chair Professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru. His most recent book is Another India: Events, Memories, People. At present, he is co-translating and editing Daredevil Mustafa, a short fiction anthology of Purnachandra Tejasvi, and The Greatest Kannada Short Stories Ever Told, and co-editing The Rammanohar Lohia Reader. Previously, he has edited Theatres of Democracy: Selected Essays of Shiv Visvanathan (2016), The Way I See It: A Gauri Lankesh Reader (2018) as well as A Life in the World (2019), a book of autobiographical interviews he did with UR Ananthamurthy. His translation of UR Ananthamurthy’s novella Bara (2016) was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award for Translations, 2017. His book on the history of development thought in colonial India will soon be published.
Charles Allen historian, broadcaster and traveller, was born in 1940 in Cawnpore (today Kanpur) in India. He left in 1947 to be schooled in England, returning to the Indian subcontinent in 1966 as a VSO (British volunteer programme) to teach in Kathmandu, where he met his future wife Lizzie. With more than 23 books to his name, Charles is today an acknowledged authority on British Indian and South Asian history, and in 2004 was awarded the Sir Percy Sykes Gold Medal by the Royal Society for Asian Affairs for his contribution to Asian studies. He is an active Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society, a Council Member of the Kipling Society and a Member of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs and the Frontline Club. Charles’s most recently published work is an Orientalist biography of emperor Ashoka, published in October 2011 as Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor. He is currently working on a biography of Brian Hodgson, the ‘father of ‘Himalayan studies’, as well as a more ambitious project: an exploration of Dravidian India under the working title of Coromandel.
Chetan Sharma is the founder of Animagic India, a reputed independent animation studio. He effortlessly dons many hats - filmmaker, animator, writer, storyteller, designer and voiceover artist. He has directed and produced two feature length animated films. He is the winner of the National Award for ‘Raju & I’ in 2005. He has illustrated over a dozen children’s books with eight titles for Karadi Tales. In 2017, he was invited to Pustaka Bookaroo in Malaysia for storytelling and illustrating sessions with children.
CHITHRA MADHAVAN a historian by profession, has a Ph.D. in Ancient History and Archaeology from the University of Mysore. A recipient of two Post-Doctoral Fellowships, she is the author of seven books and many research papers on temple art, architecture and epigraphy. She teaches at several institutions in Chennai and delivers lectures on heritage-related topics at various venues in India
Claire Scobie is an award-winning British journalist and author who has lived and worked in the UK, India and Australia. Her travel memoir, Last Seen in Lhasa, won the 2007 Dolman Best Travel Book Award. She has written for numerous publications, including the Daily Telegraph and the Observer. In 2017 she published a new memoir, A Baboon in the Bedroom, co-authored with her mother Patricia Scobie. Through her consultancy, Wordstruck, Claire advises companies and leaders on how to harness the power of storytelling as a strategic business tool. She runs writing courses in Australia, Asia and the UK, and mentors writers one-on-one. In 2013, she completed a Doctorate of Creative Arts at Western Sydney University. The Pagoda Tree is her first novel.
DAVID DAVIDAR is a writer, anthologist, and publisher. Aleph Book Company, the literary publishing firm he co-founded with Rupa Publications India, won the Publisher of the Year in 2020 and 2022. His latest book, A Case of Indian Marvels, published in 2022, is an anthology that features the best Indian writers belonging to two cohorts: the millennial generation and Gen Z.
DINESH KHANNA is a photographer and co-founder of the Delhi Photo Festival. He has worked variously as a calculator salesman, garments quality checker, a busboy in an Upper East Side Bar in New York and as a Client Servicing Executive in advertising, before finally turning to photography in 1990. His areas of interest include food, still-life, people and interiors. He has held solo exhibitions in venues that include Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, New York and San Francisco. He has produced two pictorial books - Bazaar (Penguin India) and Living Faith (Penguin India) - which were a result of over a decade of travelling through the traditional markets and religious centres of India. For the past seven years, he has been working on his next pictorial book, Benaras: Everyday in Eternity, to be published by Aleph Book Company in 2014. He also runs the non-profit organisation Nazar Foundation, with Prashant Panjiar, with the aim of mentoring young photographers and promoting the art of photography.
Divya Kapur is the Managing Trustee of Bebook Children’s Mobile Library, a not-for-profit Trust that believes that reading and learning can be fun. She also founded and runs Literati, a Bookshop Café in Goa that sells new and old books and organises book readings and other cultural events. The café has been featured in “Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores” by Bob Eckstein and was awarded the Bookstore of the Year 2014 in the Publishing Next Industry Awards. She earlier practised law in Delhi and helped organise an international lawyers conference for a French-based organisation UIA. She is also a trustee of Samvada, an organisation that works with development issues, particularly with the youth and was actively involved with the Janwadi Mahila Samiti, which is under the aegis of AIDWA in Delhi.
G. Arun Kumar is a Professor at IIT Madras
A man of many facets – Poet, Filmmaker, Lyricist, Writer - Gulzar was born in Deena, Jhelum, now in Pakistan. When he arrived in Bombay, The Poet and Filmmaker in him flourished simultaneously. He was closely associated with the Progressive Writers Movement. His creative repertoire now includes Plays, Ballets, Music Albums and Serials. Along with the respect and adulation of his audience and readers, he has also been the recipient of prestigious National Award seven times and of the Filmfare Awards 21 times. He is also well–known for his books for children. His works have been translated in to many languages. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award for the best Urdu Writer in 2002 and was conferred Padma Bhushan in 2004. He has also won an Oscar (Academy Award) for Best Original Song, ‘Jai Ho’ (Slumdog Millionaire). He is presently the chancellor of Assam University. His creative endeavour still goes on!
Gurmehar Kaur is a social activist and ambassador of Postcards for Peace, a non-profit charitable organisation. She is pursuing English literature at Lady Shri Ram College for Women while also working on her book Small Acts of Freedom’ which will be released in January. TIME magazine hailed her as ‘free speech warrior’ in their annual Next Generation Leader’s list.
Heidi Julavits is the author of many books of fiction and nonfiction, among them The Vanishers, Women in Clothes and The Folded Clock. She is a founding co-editor of The Believer Magazine. She teaches at Columbia University.
Hema Malini wears many hats with admirable ease. One of the most enduring divas of Hindi cinema, she is also a producer and director for films and television, dancer and choreographer par excellence, magazine editor, an active member of Parliament and now a singer. In an industry where the male star has traditionally driven the commercial success of films, Hema was an exception, with her name alone sufficing to ensure a film’s box-office glory. She was, arguably, India’s first female superstar. Apart from starring in mainstream super-hits like Johnny Mera Naam, Jugnu, Andaz, Seeta Aur Geeta, Sholay and, more recently, Baghban, she received critical acclaim for her performances in Lal Patthar, Khushboo, Kinara, Meera, Ek Chadar Maili Si and Razia Sultan. She is one of our greatest cultural icons, someone who has truly lived life on her own terms.
Hyeonseo Lee is a North Korean refugee and human rights activist whose bestselling memoir, The Girl with Seven Names, was published in 2015 in English by HarperCollins and since then has been translated into 20 other languages. In February 2013 Ms Lee gave a TED talk that to date has been viewed over 15 million times, and counting. Ms Lee has written for the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the LSE Big Ideas blog, and for the South Korean Ministry of Unification. She has founded and begun launching an organization that provides assistance to North Korean refugees who are victims of human trafficking and which highlights the plight of those sold into sexual slavery.
Imayam is the pen name of V Annamalai, a well known Tamil author. His books include novels like Koveru Kazhudaigal (translated into English as Beasts of Burden by Lakshmi Holmstrom), Arumugam, Chedal and En Katha; short story collections Manbaram, Video Mariamman, Kolai Cheval, Savu Soru, and Narumanam; and the novella Pethavan (translated into English as The Begetter). His works have also been translated into Kannada and Telugu. His awards include the Agni Aksra Award and the Thamizh Thendral Thiru Vi Ka Award from the government of Tamil Nadu. He has been invited to speak on aspects of modern Tamil literature and Dalit literature in Singapore, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and in universities in Kerala and Mumbai.
J Gowthama Sanna is a writer and ideologue of Dalit politics and sociology. He has published over 80 articles in several Tamil magazines since 1995. His books on Dalit and social issues include Anti-Conversion Act: History, Socio-political Background and Its Impact, Ayothidass Pandithar, and Pandithari Kodai. He also edited the ‘Liberation of Menfolk’, an address delivered by Meenambal in 1930 at Tirunelveli. He compiled and published Tamil Uyir (Tamil Life), a collection of paintings by eminent artists on the suffering of the Sri Lankan Tamils. His forthcoming books are Kalakathin Maraiporul, Tamilan Ozitha Sathi, Mathavilasa Kandanam (a refutation of Matha Vilasa Prahanasam written by Mahenra Varma Pallavan in 630AD) and Kurathiaru. As well as writing about caste and politics in Tamil Nadu, Sannah has been heavily involved in campaigning both before and since joining the VCK. He is the founder of Sangam a Dalit and Buddhist archive and platform to propagate Ambedkar’s thoughts; the Young Buddhist Association and the Dalit Student Federation. He is the founder member and treasurer of the South Indian Dalit Writers Association and founder member of International Institute of Dalit Studies and of Creators of Social Harmony, a coalition of writers, poets, artists and playwrights who came together in the aftermath of the violence in Dharmapuri.
Janice Pariat is the author of Seahorse: A Novel and Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories. She was awarded the Yuva Puraskar (Young Writer Award) from the Sahitya Akademi and the Crossword Book Award for fiction in 2013.
JEET THAYIL is a poet, novelist and musician. His four collections of poetry include These Errors Are Correct (Tranquebar), which was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for English in 2012. He has edited several anthologies, including The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. His first novel, Narcopolis (Faber & Faber), was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. He is one half of the contemporary music duo Sridhar/Thayil, whose debut album STD was released last year. He is also the author of the libretto Babur in London.
JERRY PINTO is a man of many faces. As an editor, he worked with Man’s World magazine and Paprika Media. As freelance journalist, he has written for The Hindustan Times and Mint. Jerry’s poetry has been published in several anthologies, and as a collection in Asylum (Allied Publishers). His works of fiction and non-fiction have gone into several reprints, and include Helen: The Life and Times of an H Bomb (Penguin India), which won the National Award for Best on Cinema. His latest offering, Em and the Big Hoom (Aleph Book Co.), has been described as “insanely good” by The Indian Express and “bright, sweet and heart-breaking” by India Today. He is now associated with MelJol, an NGO that works in the sphere of child rights, and is also a guest lecturer at the Social Communications Media department of the Sophia Polytechnic.
Jignesh Mevani is a social activist and lawyer from Gujarat. He is a member representing Vadgam constituency in Gujarat Legislative AssemblyHe worked as a reporter with Abhiyan, a Gujarati Magazine after receiving a post-graduate diploma in Journalism and Mass Communication. In 2013, he completed a degree in law from DT Law College, Ahmedabad. After the attack on Dalit men in Una village in Saurashtra, Jignesh led a protest march called the Dalit Asmita Yatra from Ahmedabad. This culminated in Una on August 15, 2016, and was attended by 20,000 Dalits. He has been leading a movement for Dalit rights in Gujarat since 2016.
John Boyne is the author of ten novels for adults, five for younger readers and a collection of short stories. His 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas sold nine million copies worldwide and has been adapted for cinema, theatre, ballet and opera. His novels, which include The Absolutist and A History of Loneliness, have been widely praised and become international bestsellers. John has won three Irish Book Awards and many other international literary awards and his novels are published in over 50 languages. His most recent novel, The Heart’s Invisible Furies, was published in 2017.
Jonathan Gil Harris has been visiting India for 15 years, and has been a permanent resident since June last year. He was Professor of English at George Washington University and Associate Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, the world’s leading journal of Shakespeare studies. He is the author of six books on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Shakespeare and Literary Theory and Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. In recent years, his scholarship has turned to Indian themes. He is the editor of a collection of essays, Indography: Writing the ‘Indian’ in Early Modern Culture, and has written two series for the Hindustan Times on ‘India Bana Pardes’ and ‘Tales of the First Firangis’. His most recent book is The First Firangis: How to Be Authentically Indian. Harris is now Professor of English and Dean of Academic Affairs at Ashoka University in Rai, Haryana.
Joseph, Manu is a journalist, novelist and editor of OPEN magazine. He is also a columnist for The International New York Times. His second novel, The Illicit Happiness of Other People, has been shortlisted for The Hindu Prize for Best Fiction 2013. The book is about a man named Ousep Chacko who investigates the unexplained actions of his teenage son Unni, a talented cartoonist. Joseph brings to this premise his trademark gift for humorous observation, creating a multi-layered story about how the mind works, the difference between “madness” and “normalcy”, and the aspirations of young people in 1980s Madras. His debut novel, Serious Men, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and won the 2010 The Hindu Literary Prize.
K C VIJAYA KUMAR K.C. Vijaya Kumar, The Hindu’s Sports Editor, has been a journalist for more than 25 years. He primarily writes on sport besides doing book reviews cutting across genres, and features dealing with lifestyle, arts, tour-diaries and city-specific nostalgia pieces. An alumni of Loyola College, Chennai, Vijay did his Masters in English Literature, besides a PG Diploma in Journalism, from Asian College of Journalism, when it was based in Bengaluru. Previously he has worked with Tata Motors, Mumbai, and The Asian Age, Bengaluru. An avid reader with interests that include non-fiction, short stories, poetry, environment, regional literature and the good old murder mystery, Vijay believes in the power of the written word laced with elegance and mystique.
K Srikkanth, or Krishnamachari (Kris) Srikkanth, is a former captain of the Indian cricket team and a key member of the 1983 World-Cup winning Indian cricket team. An opening batsman, “Cheeka”, as he is affectionately known, has been described variously as dashing, stylish, aggressive and swashbuckling. His batting style was entertaining, innovative and explosive. He also served as the Chairman of the BCCI Selection Committee that picked the 2011 world-cup winning Indian cricket team. He works as a broadcaster and expert commentator with various sports channels and is well known for his honest, straightforward comments, often laced with humour. Srikkanth’s motivational talk shows have been extremely popular and sought-after. Some of his clients include Cognizant Technology Solutions India Pvt Ltd (CTS), Nokia India, Bayer India, Leadership conclaves of Taj Hotel Group, Apollo Hospitals group, Nasscom, ACMA, CII, YPO, Cisco, Tata Communications, etc., besides educational institutions and educational conclaves across India. A graduate in Electrical Engineering, Kris Srikkanth is passionate about education and skill development. He has launched a variety of variety of digital/E-learning products like English Strokes, Career Strokes, Edu Strokes and Cricket Strokes.
K. Srilata is a writer, translator and academic. Her latest book This Kind of Child: The ‘Disability’ Story (Westland), brings together first-person accounts, interviews and short fiction on the disability experience. Her books include five collections of poetry, the anthologies The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry, Short Fiction from South India (OUP), All the Worlds Between: A Collaborative Poetry Project Between India and Ireland (Yoda), and Lifescapes: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers from Tamil Nadu (Women Unlimited). Srilata’s novel Table for Four (Penguin) was long- listed in 2009 for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Formerly a Professor of Literature at IIT-Madras, Srilata is now Professor and Director, Centre for Creative Writing and Translation, Sai University, Chennai.
Kamini Mahadevan had a long and exciting innings in publishing. She retired as Consultant Editor, Penguin Books. While at Penguin, she looked after the quasi-academic, non-fiction, the Penguin Classics, and translations lists. She has had the privilege of publishing several eminent and award-winning authors, from U.R. Ananthamurthy, David Shulman and V. Narayana Rao, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Vinay Dharwadkar, Martha Ann Selby, Vijay Nambisan to Romila Thapar, Rajmohan Gandhi, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Mukul Kesavan, Shashi Tharoor, Samanth Subramaniam, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Baradwaj Rangan and Sanjaya Baru, among many others. She now lives in Bangalore and freelances.
Karan Johar made his directorial debut at age 25 with a path breaking love story Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Following this, over the last 15 years, he has directed and written critically and commercially acclaimed blockbusters like Kabhie Khushi Kabhi Gham, Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna and My Name is Khan. Besides being an acclaimed director and one of the most influential men in the industry today, Karan is also a television personality, a talk show host, a costume designer and an actor. His talk show, Koffee With Karan, has the distinction of being the most watched English talk show on Indian television. Karan Johar has also been a mentor to many successful directors in India. As a producer, he has released both commercial blockbusters like Agneepath, Dostana and Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, as well as critical indie successes like Wake Up Sid and Ek Main Aur Ek Tu. He is among a group of prolific Indian filmmakers who have brought about a fresh and modern outlook to Indian commercial cinema and contributed greatly to the transformation of Hindi cinema.
Karan Karki is the pen name of J Dhinakaran. His first novel Arupadam Vilangu won two awards. His other novels are Karuppu Vidhaigal, Karuppar Nagaram, Varugirargal and Otraipal. Karuppar Nagaram won an award from New Century Book House and Otraipal won the Sujatha Award 2017. He is working on another novel, Marapaalam. He has also been a dialogue writer for films and worked as an assistant director
Kelly Falconer launched the Asia Literary Agency in March 2013 to represent Asian authors, experts on Asia and writers living in the Australia-Asia region. Previously she was a London-based editor of fiction and non-fiction working in-house or as a freelancer for literary agents, scouts and publishers including Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orion Books, Virgin Books, Granta magazine and Constable & Robinson. In 2012 she was the literary editor of the Hong Kong-based Asia Literary Review and she has contributed to the FT, the TLS and the Spectator.
Kiran Karnik is widely recognised for his work in the IT sector, as President NASSCOM from 2001 to 2008, and for helping to put Satyam Computers back on track — as Chairman of its government-appointed Board. He has been on many key government committees, including the Scientific Advisory Council to Prime Minister, and the National Innovation Council. Karnik was CEO of Discovery Communications India (1995-2001) and launched Discovery Channel and Animal Planet in India and South Asia. As Founder-Director of Consortium for Educational Communication (1991-95), he oversaw production and transmission of UGC’s Countrywide Classroom TV programmes. Earlier, he spent over two decades in ISRO and was deeply involved in the use of space technology, especially for education and development, including the path-breaking Indo-US Satellite Instructional TV Experiment (SITE) and the Kheda TV project. He is currently involved with a number of not-for-profit organizations in the fields of education and development, and is the honorary President of India Habitat Centre and Chair of Oxfam India. He is on the governing bodies of a number of educational institutions, including IIM-Ahmedabad and IIT-Jodhpur, and chairs the Board of Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIITD). He also serves as an Independent Director on the Boards of a few companies. He has contributed to, authored and edited many books, including The Coalition of Competitors, on NASSCOM and the IT industry. His latest book (Crooked Minds) is on innovation. He has also been a regular contributor to major national dailies. Karnik has been conferred many awards, including the Padma Shri.
KR Meera is a multi-award-winning writer and columnist who has published more than a dozen books including short stories, novels and essays and has won some of the most prestigious literary prizes including the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, the Vayalar Award and the Odakkuzhal Award. In 2015, she won the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award for Aarachar, widely hailed as a contemporary classic and a bestseller in Malayalam with more than 150,000 copies in less than three years. Published in English as Hangwoman, it was shortlisted for the DSC Prize. Her other translated works include Yellow Is The Colour Of Longing, The Gospel of Yudas, The Poison Of Love and And Slowly Forgetting That Tree. Yellow Is The Colour Of Longing was shortlisted for the Crossword Prize for Translation and The Poison Of Love was longlisted for The DSC Prize 2017 and shortlisted for the Atta Ghalatta Lit Prize. She lives in Kottayam with her husband Dileep and daughter Shruthi.
Lakshmi Saravanakumar is a Tamil author and filmmaker. He has to his credit seven short story collections, three novels and a collection of poetry and essays each. He has won many awards for his writing including the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2016 for his novel Kanagan and the Ananda Vikatan Award in 2016 for his short story collection Mayaana Kaandam. In 2013, his novel Uppu Naigal won the Sujatha Award. He was the district council member in Tamil Nadu Murpokku Ezhuthaalargal Sangam for six years. His fourth novel, Gomorrah, will be published in Janury 2018. He directed a short film, Mayana Thangam, which was screened at the competitions section of the Slum Film Fest 2015 in Kenya. He has worked with the national award winning director Vasanthabalan as assistant director for Aravaan and associate director for Kaviya Thalaivan. He is one of the screenplay writers for the movie Indian 2 and is working on a book on Shankar’s 2.0.
Larissa Bertonasco was born in 1972 in Heilbronn. She studied Italian and History Of Art in Siena and Hamburg and Illustration at the Design Department of Armgartstrasse College in Hamburg/HAW Hamburg. She obtained her diploma in 2003 with her illustrated cookbook La nonna La cucina La vita: Recipes from my Italian grandmother, which became an international bestseller. Since then she works as a freelance illustrator for magazines, publishing houses and advertising. She hosts culinary readings, exhibitions and since 2004 she is a co-publisher and author of the magazine SPRING by only female graphic artists. She lives in Hamburg with her daughter, son and the painter Ari Goldmann and organises workshops and art projects for children and teenagers besides offering courses and lectures for students and adults. In 2014, together with Ludmilla Bartscht and Priya Kuriyan, she led the workshop ‘Drawing attention’ in New Delhi, which was attended by 15 Indian cartoonists, who created graphic stories on ‘gender issues’. The book ‘Drawing the Line’ originated in this encounter.
Ludmilla Bartscht was born in 1981 in Freiburg. She studied Visual Communication at the University of Fine Art in Berlin and at Hochschule for Applied Science in Hamburg with a focus on drawing and narration. In early 2012 she finished her diploma on the subject of modern nomads, Wenn der Rucksack scheuert, with Prof. Anke Feuchtenberger and Prof Ellen Sturm. She served as a curator for exhibitions in Hamburg, Berlin, Freiburg and Linz besides being a member of several art clubs, such as art club Freiburg. Her work has been shown in several countries such as Germany, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Spain and Austria.She works as a lecturer at HKDM Freiburg and has conducted numerous workshops at home and abroad. She lives as a freelance artist and instructor in Freiburg.
Malavika Natraj has been writing for nearly two decades, starting out with stories in local magazines and later writing feature articles for both print and online media. Educated in India and the U.K, she holds degrees in Economics and Marketing. She began her career in advertising and went on to work for a research and consulting firm in London, U.K. She became a freelance writer in 2007 and in 2008, she won an award at the Wimbledon Book Fest (U.K) for her short story Waiting. Since then, she has carried on writing full-time and her work - which includes feature articles, art and music reviews, copywriting and web content - spans a variety of subjects and relates to many different audiences. Her first book for children,Suraya’s Gift, was published in October 2015.
Mamta Sagar is a Kannada poet, playwright and translator living in Bengaluru. She has four collections of poems and plays, including Hiige HaaLeya Maile HaaDu (like this on the page the song, 2007), Hide & Seek, 2014, a collection of selected poems in English translated by Chitra Panikkar. The Swing of Desire, translation of her Kannada play Mayye Bhaara Manave Bhaara, was included in Staging Resistance: Plays by Women in Translation (2004). She edited and translated Beyond Barriers: Slovenian-Kannada Literature Interactions, a trilingual compilation of poems and stories (2011). Elif Shafak’s Forty Rules of Love is one of her recent translations into Kannada. She has collaborated on her poetry performance with visual artists, musicians and poets from other language areas within and outside India, and was recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship in 2015.
Margrete Lamond began her trade publishing career at Scholastic Press in 2002, where she built an award-winning list. Publisher at Little Hare 4 Books/Hardie Grant Egmont from 2006 to 2017, she is currently Creative Director and Publisher at Dirt Lane Press. Her focus is quality picture-books, for which her internationally acclaimed authors and illustrators continue to win awards. Margrete is also a published author, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Tatterhood and Other Feisty Folktales, a re-imagined Nutcracker and most recently The Sorry Tale of Fox and Bear. Margrete has a keen interest in the not-for-profit publishing model as the way of the future for publishing. She holds a Master’s degree in children’s literature, conducts workshops in narrative illustration, and her special interests are evolutionary approaches to the aesthetics of picture-book illustration, regarding which she has presented papers at an international level.
Mike Brearley read philosophy at Cambridge, and taught it at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne for three years. He played cricket, captaining Cambridge, Middlesex and England. He has written about cricket, notably in the Art of Captaincy (1985). He trained as a psychoanalyst (qualifying in 1985) and speaks with this orientation about being on and off form in various fields. He still works as a psychoanalyst in private practice, but has also worked as a school counsellor, a nursing assistant in a Unit for Adolescents, and in a psychotherapy Unit. He has taught and written on a range of psychoanalytic topics, as well as presenting talks on topics such as leadership and teamwork. He was President of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 2008 to 2010, and was also President of MCC from 2007-08. He has recently retired as Chair of the World Cricket Committee. His most recent book is On Form.
Mini Krishnan is the co-ordinating editor of the Tamil Nadu Textbook and Educational Services Corporation’s plan to support English translations of Tamil works through 14 publishers. She has edited literary translations for Oxford University Press (2001-19) and for Macmillan India Ltd (1992-2000). She was the Founding Editor of the South Asia Website for Women Writers hosted by the British Council; Member, Translation Mission; and Member, Indian Literature Abroad. She writes for The Hindu, the English portal of the Mathrubhoomi, and selects translated fiction for Frontline. Over her four-decade-long career, she has edited 135 full-length translations — fiction, non-fiction, poetry and short stories — from 15 Indian languages, been and worked on educational texts prescribed at school and university levels.
Mukund Padmanabhan was the editor of The Hindu between 2016 and 2019
N. RAM, former Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu and other Group publications, is a political journalist with literary interests. A former Chairman and a former Publisher of The Hindu Publishing Group, he is currently a Director in the Group. Ram has written on a range of socio-political subjects, including media freedom and responsibility, and specialised in investigative journalism. His areas of special journalistic interest include Indian politics; aspects of India’s foreign policy and nuclear policy; external pressures on India’s economic and political sovereignty; issues of corruption and abuse of power; the challenge of communalism and fundamentalism in India; the Sri Lankan ethnic crisis, the Tamil question, and India’s interaction with it; India-China relations; freedom of expression issues; and the role of media in society. He is a co-biographer, with Susan Ram, of the writer, R.K. Narayan. He was elected president of the Contemporary India Section of the 72nd session of the Indian History Congress (2011). Honours and awards include the Padma Bhushan (for journalism), 1990; the Sri Lanka Ratna (2005); the Asian Investigative Journalist of the Year Award from the Press Foundation of Asia (1990); the B.D. Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism (1989); XLRI’s first JRD Tata Award for Business Ethics (2002); the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism’s Alumni Award (2003); and the Raja Ram Mohan Roy Award for contributions to journalism from the Press Council of India (2018).
NANDINI KRISHNAN is the author of Hitched: The Modern Indian Woman and Arranged Marriage and Invisible Men: Inside India’s Transmasculine Networks. She is also the award-winning translator of Perumal Murugan’s Estuary and Four Strokes of Luck and Other Stories. Her translation of Kalki’s magnum opus Ponniyin Selvan is being released in 10 parts. She has translated Charu Nivedita’s Conversations with Aurangzeb: A Novel. Nandini’s novel-in-manuscript won the Writers of the World Festival prize, 2014. Her translation of Sajjad Haider Yaldram’s Save Me from My Friends was shortlisted for the Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu-English Translation 2022. Nandini lives with dozens of animals, thousands of books, and a varying number of humans in Madras.
Narayan Lakshman is a Senior Associate Editor at The Hindu, As a member of the senior editorial management of the newspaper, he manages its opinion pages, writes editorial and opinion articles, and has curated special editorial projects including article series on India’s water and healthcare crises and investigative features. He has written over 2,000 articles to date. He regularly appears on news television channels as an expert political commentator. From February 2010, Dr. Lakshman served for six years as The Hindu’s U.S. correspondent based in Washington DC and earlier worked in the Tamil Nadu bureau at The Hindu’s Chennai headquarters. His doctoral research at the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics, on the political economy of poverty alleviation in India, was synthesised into a book titled Patrons of the Poor: Caste Politics and Policymaking in India (2011, OUP India). He also served as a consultant at the Asian Development Bank, where he authored a Working Paper on “The Political Economy of Good Governance for Poverty Alleviation Policies”. He has been a research analyst at a London-based hedge fund.
Natasha Badhwar was born in Ranchi, grew up in Kolkata and refused to accept Delhi as home for the next three decades. She is the author of My Daughters’ Mum, a collection of searing, candid essays where she interweaves the personal and the political in a resonant style. Natasha began her career in broadcast journalism with New Delhi Television (NDTV) as the first female videographer in news television in India. She quit 13 years later as Vice President, Training and Development, and now works as an independent film-maker, media trainer and fashion entrepreneur. She is a columnist with Mint Lounge. She lives in New Delhi with her husband and three daughters.
Nia Davies is a poet and editor. She has published two pamphlets, Then Spree (Salt, 2012) and Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmısınız or Long Words (Boiled String, 2016). England is forthcoming from Crater, and All fours, her first full length book, was published by Bloodaxe in June 2017. She has curated several international literature projects and collaborations and edits Poetry Wales. She is undertaking research at Salford University on ritual and transcultural poetic practice.
Nidhi Razdan is an award-winning journalist and author, currently Executive Editor with NDTV where she has worked for over 18 years. Nidhi reports on foreign policy and national politics and anchors a daily prime time news show called Left Right and Centre. She has reported from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, China, POK, Tibet, Africa and more parts of the world. Her first book Left Right and Centre: The Idea of India at 70 was published in 2017.
Nissar Allana is the current Director of The Dramatic Art & Design Academy (DADA), a theatre training academy as well as the production company Theatre & Television Associates, based in Delhi and of the Delhi Ibsen Festival. He is a theatre scenographer and a lighting designer, who has designed sets & lights for over 70 theatre productions to date for well-known directors like Richard Schechner, Amal Allana, Rolf Stahl, Egil Kipste and others. He trained at the Schaubuhne in Berlin, in 1975. Nissar is also a lighting designer and has designed the Son-et-lumieres at the Golconda Fort and at the Cellular jail in Port Blair. He was the Set Decorator for Richard Attenborough’s film “Gandhi”. He designed a pioneering exhibition on Scenography, titled, “The Designer in the Theatre” in 1975, which was exhibited in Mumbai, Delhi and Chandigarh. Later he designed exhibitions titled “The Sanskrit Theatre” and “The Folk Theatre of India” in India and abroad. Most recently he designed and curated an exhibition titled, “Painted Sceneries” in January 2008, based on the painted scenic backdrops of the Marathi Sangeet Natak (1880-1960’s) and an exhibition spanning 50 years of Alkazi’s theatre, titled, ‘The Theatre of E Alkazi’. He produced the inauguration and closing ceremonies of the Asian Track & Field Meet with 2400 performers. He was also Art Director for two television serials Raj Se Swaraj and Mullah Nasruddin. He directed the inauguration of the Festival of India in the USA and designed and coordinated a photographic exhibition on India at the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. His awards include the prestigious Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, the Delhi Natya Sangh Award and a Scroll of Honour by the Delhi Medical Association for his contribution to Theatre and to Stage Design. Since 1971, he has founded three theatre groups: The Workshop, Studio 1, and Theatre & Television Associates
Norman Ohler is a novelist and filmmaker. In 1995, he published Die Quotenmaschine, a detective story set in New York and the first hypertext-novel across the world. In 2004, while holding the post of City Writer in Ramallah, Palestine, he was the last European to interview Yasser Arafat before his death. In 2006 he travelled through Iran and produced a podcast about his visits to Teheran, Shiraz, Yazd, and Isfahan. As a filmmaker, Ohler collaborated with Wim Wenders writing the script for Palermo Shooting, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 2008. After five years of research, his first non-fiction book, Der totale Rausch (translated as Blitzed) about the role of drugs in Nazi-Germany, appeared in 2015 and instantly became an international bestseller, having been translated into over 25 languages. His other books are Mitte (2001), Ponte City (2002), Der totale Rausch (2015) and Die Gleichung des Lebens (2017).
Srinivasan, Pankaja has been a journalist for more thsn 25 years. She has been with The Hindu for eight years and is currently Senior assistant editor heading the MetroPlus edition in Coimbatore. She has travelled the length and breadth of the country accompanying her husband who was a helicopter pilot in the Indian Air Force, and lived with him and two infants at Leh for two years. She enjoys travelling and writing about her travels.
PARO ANAND is best known for her writing for young adults. She works extensively for young people in difficult circumstances, especially with orphans of separatist violence in Kashmir. Using literature as a creative outlet, she provided a platform for the traumatized young to express their grief in ways that they had been unable to before. Out of these experiences came three works: No Guns At My Son’s Funeral, Weed, and Wild Child. Paro Anand headed the National Centre for Children’s Literature, the apex body for children’s literature in India. She is a renowned performance storyteller and has performed her stories all over India and in the UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, Sweden and Singapore. Her book, The Little Bird Who Held the Sky Up With His Feet, was on the 1001 Books to Read before You Grow Up list. She runs a programme Literature in Action where she uses stories to talk about difficult issues with young people and empower them creatively, linguistically and emotionally. She is a mentor and curator for Vani Foundation’s Fellowship programme and children’s list.
Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University. He took a first-class degree in history at Cambridge, before moving to Oxford to do his doctorate. Peter was Senior Scholar at Corpus Christi College and, since 2000, has been Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. His book, The Silk Roads: A New History of the world has been described as ‘magnificent’ (Sunday Times) ‘dazzling’ (Guardian), ‘a rare book that makes you question your assumptions about the world’ (Wall St Journal) and ‘not just the most important history book in years, but the most important in decades’ (Berliner Zeitung). It has topped the bestseller lists all around the world, including in the UK and China. Peter works on the history of trade, religion, ideas and culture, and particularly at exchanges along the Silk Roads of the past, present and future. A keen sportsman, he has won blues at both Oxford and Cambridge and plays cricket for The Authors CC.
Pierre Ducrozet (35) has already authored four novels,namely Requiem pour Lola rouge, La vie qu’on voulait and Eroica (Grasset) and the biography of the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, L'invention des corps (Actes Sud). At present he teaches creative writing at the prestigious university of Cambre. At present he lives in Barcelona and is laureate of the very prestigious Prix de Flore in November 2017.
Pradeep Chakravarthy, who is based in Chennai, runs a heritage tour company and does management consultancy in behaviour change
Pranay Lal is a biochemist by training and works for a non-profit organisation in the area of public health. He has been a cartoonist for newspapers, an animator for a leading advertising agency, an environmental campaigner, and worked towards the development of HIV vaccine. For the past ten years, he has worked on lung health focussing on tobacco control. His first book, Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent was released in December 2016.
Praveen Anand is an alumnus of the Institute of Hotel Management and Catering Technology and has had an accomplished career as a Chef with 33 years of experience. Right after his degree he joined the Sheraton hotel in Chennai where he trained in the western cuisine. His knowledge of and passion for South Indian cuisine made him the natural choice to head Dakshin at the erstwhile Sheraton Park (Crowne Plaza). A member for curriculum and syllabi preparation for Post Graduate programmes – MBA in Hospitality Management of Anna University - Chef Anand is also a member of the National Council Ministry of Tourism, Government of India, for R & D of Regional Cuisines. He is a World Association of Chefs Society-qualified (WACS) international judge of cooking competitions. In October 2009, he was invited by the Sidney Morning Herald, to showcase Indian food at the Sydney International Food Festival. He was the only chef from India among the 22 others from across the world. He also has been the part of a panel of International judges at the Lanka Culinary Challenge – Colombo, Sri Lanka in 2011, 2013, 2015 & 2017. He has received the Golden Hat award by the South India Chef Association in 2010 and was awarded Chef of the Year, 2016at the Times Food Awards 2017 in Chennai.
Prayaag Akbar is a writer and journalist. His critically-acclaimed first novel, Leila, was published in India in April last year. He is a consulting editor at Mint. He lives in Mumbai with his wife.
PREMA REVATHI is a writer, actor and activist who runs a school for nomadic tribal children at a village in coastal Tamil Nadu. She was a full-time journalist and continues to write articles in English and Tamil. She is also a translator and is working on non-fiction translations from English to Tamil. Along with Krishna Veni, she began Maitri, a feminist publishing house that aims to bring out memoirs of women, books introducing feminist philosophies and literary anthologies on feminist themes. Lakshmi Ennum Payani, a memoir by a woman activist from a small town in Tamil Nadu, is Maitri’s first Book.
Priya Kurian is a children’s book illustrator, comic book artist and an animator. A graduate of the National Institute of design (Ahmedabad), she has directed educational films for the Sesame street show (India) and the Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI) and illustrated numerous children’s books for various Indian publishers. Apart from writing and illustrating short comics for the Indian express, The Hindu Business Line, India Today and other magazines, she has contributed to Indian comics anthologies like Pao, This side that side and First hand 2 (an anthology of non-fiction comics). She was also part of the Indo German collaboration ‘Elephant in the room’ published by Zubaan books. She’s also collaborated with the writer Devapriya Roy on a graphic biography for young adults.
R Azhagarasan (Dr) holds a PhD in Comparative Literature (Tamil-English-Folklore) and teaches at the Department of English, University of Madras. He has published articles on issues of cultural politics in national and international journals both in Tamil and English. He has written about the Tamil translations of Alice in Wonderland for the novel’s 150th year celebrations. In 2009, he translated a collection of Dalit activist Ravikumar’s critical writings as Venomous Touch. He co-edited with Ravikumar, The Oxford Anthology of Tamil Dalit Writing, in 2012. He translated Catherine Belsey’s Oxford Short Introduction to Poststructuralism from English to Tamil. He has edited an anthology on the concept of Bhakti in Tamil culture. His Tamil writings appeared as Utpagai Unarum Tharunam in 2017.
R V RAMANI is a leading documentary filmmaker and cinematographer. He is a graduate of the Film and TV Institute of India, Pune, specialising in cinematography. With more than 25 independent films to his credit, he has established a unique style of his own, making self-reflective impressionistic documentaries, which has found recognition in India and abroad.
Radhika Menon started Tulika as an independent, multilingual children’s publishing house in 1996. Tulika’s picture books are published in nine languages – English, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati and Bengali. The list includes the entire range for 0 to 16 – from baby board books to fiction and non-fiction for young people. The imaginatively created books have pioneered a new wave of children’s publishing in India. The books have won many awards over the years, both national and international. Radhika believes that translating across different languages gives voice and image to cultural diversity in a way that publishing in one language does not. A hands-on publisher, she is deeply involved in the visualizing, editing, designing and marketing of Tulika books.
Rajdeep Sardesai was till recently the editor of chief of IBN 18 network and the author of 2014: The Elections that Changed India. He has 26 years of journalistic experience in print and television. Before setting up the IBN network channels, he was the Managing Editor of both NDTV 24X7 and NDTV India. He also worked with The Times of India for six years and was city editor of its Mumbai edition at the age of 26. During the last 26 years, he has covered major national and international stories, specialising in national politics. He has won numerous awards for journalistic excellence, including the prestigious Padma Shri for Journalism in 2008, the International Broadcasters award for coverage of the 2002 Gujarat riots and the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism award for 2007. He has won the Asian Television award for talk show presentation and has been News Anchor of the year at the Indian Television Academy for eight of the last nine years. He has been the President of the Editors Guild of India and was also chosen as a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the world economic forum. Sardesai writes a fortnightly column across several newspapers, including The Hindustan Times.
RAJIV C LOCHAN is the Managing Director and CEO of Kasturi & Sons Ltd (most famously known as The Hindu Group of Publications in India). He heads all non-editorial operations and is the first non-family member on the Board in the company’s 137-year history. Rajiv also devotes time to the social sector in the areas of public health and financial inclusion. He is a Trustee Board member of IKP Trust, a not-for-profit organisation focussed on leveraging knowledge and technology to drive innovation in public health and on the Board of IFMR Trust Financial Holdings, an entity focussed on delivering financial products and services to the bottom of the pyramid in rural geographies in India. Rajiv is an alumnus partner of McKinsey’s India practice and one of the firm’s founding partners of its Chennai practice. At McKinsey, Rajiv served over 30 institutions, including 25 banks and financial institutions in India, South-east Asia and the US. Prior to McKinsey, Rajiv worked for American Express Company in New York, where he was most recently Director - Risk Management, responsible for credit/fraud authorisations policy formulation. Rajiv has also worked with US Airways in Arlington, VA, in the schedule-planning group and was a summer intern at the World Bank in Washington, DC. He holds an undergraduate degree from IIT, Madras, and an MS from MIT, Cambridge, MA, and an MBA from the Columbia Business School in New York.
Rajmohan Gandhi is a historian and biographer who served as Research Professor at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Illinois, US until end 2012. His latest book is Prince of Gujarat: The Extraordinary Story of Prince Gopaldas Desai, 1887-1951. His Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten was published in 2013. An earlier book, Gandhi: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire, received the prestigious Biennial Award from the Indian History Congress in 2007. In 2002 he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for his Rajaji: A Life. His other books include Patel: A Life; Revenge & Reconciliation: Understanding South Asian History; Eight Lives: A Study of the Hindu-Muslim Encounter; and Ghaffar Khan: Nonviolent Badshah of the Pakhtuns. In the early 1990s, Rajmohan Gandhi served as a Member of the Rajya Sabha. Before that he was Resident Editor, Indian Express, in Chennai, and Chief Editor, Himmat, Mumbai.
Rajni Bakshi is the author of ‘Bapu Kuti: Journeys in Rediscovery of Gandhi’
Rakesh Raghunathan is a South Indian culinary ambassador, whose vision is to showcase the rich heritage of the region to global audiences. He brings a unique perspective and experience of South Indian cuisine, while also seeking to turn the spotlight on the custodians of these traditional knowledge systems. A food raconteur, armed with a wealth of anecdotal history, and a deep insight into socio-cultural practices, Rakesh has taken food to the realm of the performative. His presentations are a multi-sensory and aesthetic experience with an element of romance thrown in, as he draws his audiences into a space where food and art converge seamlessly. Rakesh is featured in the eminent panel of judges in MasterChef India, Tamil. His travels are documented in several TV shows.
Ram Kamal Mukherjee started his career with The Asian Age, Kolkata, in 2001. In another two years, he would go on to host his own television chat show, Talk Bangla. He was also the youngest – and possibly first – journalist to host a sex-education show, called Chokhey Amar Trishna,for Asian Television Network. Ram Kamal went on to work with several leading publications, including Stardust, Mumbai Mirror, Mid-Day, ABP Group’s Ananda Bazaar Patrika and Anandalok, and TV 18. His column for Mumbai Mirror, ‘Ram Katha’,enjoyed a large following. He also worked for PritishNandy Communications as Vice President, Special Projects. He is the author of the coffee-table book, Diva Unveiled: Hema Malini, which won the Best Author Award 2006 given by the Kalakar Awards Foundation, Kolkata, and Long Island Iced Tea. He has also produced a television series, Bin KuchKahe, for Zee TV. Ram Kamal was honoured with the Best Journalism Award in 2006 by Lions Club, Mumbai.
Raman Shresta grew up in a bookstore. When he was four, his family opened Rachna Books in Gangtok. The bookshop was forced to close down in 1988. After much soul-searching, Shresta re-started Rachna Books in 2001. Rachna Books has since emerged as a vibrant cultural landmark in the Himalaya. It has organised a wide range of events as a platform for arts, literature, culture, films, theatre, concerts and workshops. Rachna Books won the Publishing Next Industry Award for the Bookstore of the Year Category in the year 2015-16. Raman was the jury member for the award the following year. He has spoken on challenges of fore-fronting books and curating a bookshop at lit-fests. He also runs Café Fiction and Bookman’s Bed-n-Breakfast to support his bookshop.
Raphaël Gastebois, an architect and urban planner, born in 1976 in Coutances, Normandy, is an international technical expert in urban development and advices for Pondicherry government in his Smart City project. A graduate of the Normandy School of Architecture in 2001, trained in conservation and restoration of the heritage at the school of Chaillot in Paris, then in the School of Ponts & Chaussées, he was the collaborator of Bruno Decaris, then Pierre-Yves Caillault, Chief architects of Historical Monuments. Next 15 years, he joined the deconcentrated Administration of the Ministry of Culture where he worked as Head of Architecture and Heritage Department in several French Regions : Normandy, Champagne-Ardenne and in the Indian Ocean in Reunion and Mayotte. During these years he also taught at the Institute for Land and Urban Planning of Reims University and at the National Schools of Architecture of Nancy and Montpellier and carried out several international missions (Hungary, India). In 2016 he joined to the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs to be placed at the disposal of the Indian administration as part of France's cooperation action on the government's Smart Cities program Indian.
Robert Dessaix is one of Australia’s best-loved writers. A former Russian scholar and presenter of a national book programme on ABC radio, he is best-known for his books A Mother’s Disgrace (where he investigates his French ancestors), Night Letters, Corfu and And So Forth – all which have been translated into several European languages. His other published works include a collection of originally spoken pieces As I Was Saying (2012) and What Days Are For (2014). An enthusiastic traveller all his life, a translator of Dostoyevsky and Turgenev and frequent visitor to India, his latest book The Pleasures of Leisure is partly set in Darjeeling, India and has reference to Hinduism and Khajuraho as well.
Rosella Stephen is the editor of The Hindu Magazine and Literary Review. She was earlier editor of Weekend, the Saturday magazine at The Hindu, and launched Indulge, a lifestyle magazine at The New Indian Express in 2006. She has served on multiple panels on entertainment, art appreciation, luxury and leadership at various organisations, including The British Council, Biennale of Contemporary Sacred Art (BACS), IndiEarth Xchange, FDCI and Lakme Fashion Week. Culture is at an important inflection point, she says, and the access provided by digital, video and social makes this an interesting time to be documenting it.
S Hussain Zaidi is a Mumbai-based journalist, a veteran of investigative, crime and terror reporting in Mumbai media. He has worked Resident Editor at the Asian Age, Mumbai; Editor investigations at the Mumbai Mirror, Mid-Day, and the Indian Express. He has authored several bestsellers like Black Friday, Dongri to Dubai,the Mafia Queens of Mumbai, Byculla to Bangkok and the latest Dangerous Minds. Zaidi is also associate producer for the HBO movie, Terror in Mumbai, based on the 26/11 terror strikes.
S.G. VASUDEV is a founder-member of the Cholamandal Artists’ Village, Chennai, where he lived and worked till 1988. He now lives in Bangalore. Vasudev works in various mediums (drawings, paintings, reliefs in copper and tapestries in silk). He has participated in several important group exhibitions in India and abroad including the Triennale India, the Paris Biennale, the Havana Biennale, India’s National Gallery of Modern Art show in Washington, the Festival of India in Tokyo and The New South: Contemporary Paintings & Sculpture from South India in London. He has held solo exhibitions in different parts of India and the world. Vasudev has also been on the Executive Board of the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, and worked as a selection committee member twice for National Exhibition of Art. He is currently a member of the advisory committee of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore. Vasudev has designed and/or contributed paintings for the cover of several books by leading Kannada writers. He has also been art director for two award-winning Kannada films Samskara and Vamsha Vriksha.
Sadaf Saaz is a poet, writer, entrepreneur and women’s rights advocate. She lives in Dhaka, where she is involved in a range of initiatives as a cultural activist and curator. She is a festival director and the producer of the annual Dhaka Literary Festival (previously Hay Festival Dhaka), which she co-founded in 2011. She also runs an arts management organization, which curates and produces events, festivals, special projects, theatre and dance productions, and films. She is the author of a collection of poems, Sari Reams, published by UPL in 2013. Her monologues based on Bangladeshi women’s experiences, ‘Je Kotha Jai Na Bola’ (That which cannot be said), has been performed in various locations in Bangladesh.
Sagarika Ghose is a senior journalist and author, currently Consulting Editor Times Of India. She joined journalism in 1991 and has been a journalist and media personality for over 25 years. She started her career in the Times Of India, was part of the start up team of Outlook magazine and then went on to work for The Indian Express. She was deputy editor and prime time news anchor on the news network CNNIBN. She is also the author of two novels, The Gin Drinkers (1999) and Blind Faith (2005), both published worldwide. Her latest book is Indira, India’s Most Powerful Prime Minister (2017). Ghose is a Rhodes Scholar and completed her post graduate studies in Modern History from Oxford University,UK.
Sam Cooney runs the not-for-profit literary organisation TLB, which produces the quarterly literary magazine The Lifted Brow, publishes books under its Brow Books imprint, posts commentary and criticism online every week, stages events, awards writing prizes, and more. He is publisher-in-residence at RMIT University, teaches sessionally at several universities, and is a freelance writer and literary critic. He judges literary prizes, sits on a couple of advisory boards, chairs events, and in 2017 took part in the Small Press Network mentorship programme as well as the Australia Councils ‘Future Leaders’ professional development programme
Sambaiah Gundimeda (Dr) holds degrees in Political Science from Andhra Loyola College, Vijayawada, University of Hyderabad; and School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He taught at Vignan Degree College (now, Vignan University), Guntur for two years before reassuming his studies in 1999. In 2002, he was awarded the Ford Foundation Fellowship (India Programme) Award to pursue his PhD at SOAS. He was a Teaching Associate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS (2007-09), and an Assistant Professor at Council for Social Development (CSD), Hyderabad (2011-2014). He was also a Charles Wallace Visiting Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, a Visiting Associate Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, and a Fellow (Associate Professor) at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. He writes both in English and Telugu and his publications include books, research papers, and essays. He has been with the School of Policy and Governance at Azim Premji University since July 2014.
SANDHYA RAO has worked in the media for many years, as a print journalist, books editor and children’s books writer, and also helped dancer Chandralekha coordinate an exhibition called ‘Stree’ as part of the Festival of India in Moscow, 1988. She has written about 25 books — mostly picture books — in English and other Indian languages such as Hindi, Tamil and Bengali. Some well-known titles are Ekki Dokki, Storm in the Garden, Grandma’s Eyes, My Friend the Sea, My Mother’s Sari, Picture Gandhi and My Gandhi Scrapbook. Her latest books are Stories on the Sand and Okaasama Otousama. In 2006, she was one of only two children’s authors from India to be invited to the Frankfurt Bookfair. Her book, My Friend the Sea, received a prize at the Berlin Literary Festival in 2005. She is now a Deputy Editor with the Hindu BusinessLine in Chennai.
Sanjay Pinto is an advocate at the Madras High Court, a columnist and author. Before his transition from the newsroom to the courtroom, Sanjay was the face of NDTV in South India for 15 years. As the Resident Editor of NDTV 24x7 and Executive Editor of NDTV Hindu, he reported and anchored news and talk shows from South India. Sanjay appears on prime-time TV debates as a political analyst and is the author of three books: My NDTV Days, Justice For All and Speakers Are Made Not Born. A former National Debating Champion, Sanjay is a public speaking mentor and a guest lecturer on Media Law at National Law Schools in India.
Santanu Bose studied comparative literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, before graduating from the National School of Drama. He started his theatre career with an apprenticeship under Tripti Mitra. He takes particular interest in making performances in multicultural situations. He has taught and created visual construction for flms, and applied digital technology to gallery-based artworks.
Saravanan Chandran is a 38-year-old author, journalist and entrepreneur based in Kovilpatti, Tamil Nadu. He has worked with publishing house Kalachuvadu and with television channels like Vijay TV, India Today and Zee TV. Formerly senior political correspondent with India Today, he directed the popular show Solvathellam Unmai. His books include the novels Ainthu Muthalaikalin Kathai, Rolex Watch Ajva, Barbie; short story collections Venniradai and Paavathin Sambalam; and essays Mathikettan Solai and Ecstasy. He received the Sujatha award for Ainthu Muthalaikalin Kathai and, in 2016, the Nambikai Manitharkal award from Ananda Vikatan. Having been in the media for 20 years, he wries for The Hindu Tamil and Ananda Vikatan and is active in print, television and digital mediums.
Sashi Kumar is the founder and Chairman of the Media Development and Asian College of Journalism. He is a print and broadcast journalist. He was among the earliest newscasters in English on national television, Doordarshan, Middle East Correspondent of The Hindu and news anchor on Radio Bahrain in the mid-1980s. He has produced many docu-features for television. In 1992 he founded and launched Asianet, India’s first satellite and cable TV in a regional language. He received the Vijayaraghavan Memorial Award in 2007 and the Swadeshabhimani-Kesari Puraskaram from the government of Kerala in 2011 for his contribution to media. In 2004 he scripted and directed Kaya Taran, an award-winning Hindi feature film based on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the 2002 Gujarat riots. He has acted in a few Malayalam feature films. Sashi writes a regular fortnightly column titled ‘Unmediated’ in Frontline; it is also the title of the book comprising his essays and articles published by Tulika Books in 2013.
Sebastian Faulks worked as a journalist before becoming a full-time writer in 1991. His novels include the French Trilogy (The Girl at the Lion d’Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray), A Possible Life and On Green Dolphin Street. He wrote the James Bond novel Devil May Care in 2007. Other books, including Human Traces, Engleby and and his most recent, Where My Heart Used to Beat, have been concerned with the frailty of the human mind. His latest, Paris Echo, will come out in September 2018. When not writing, he plays tennis at his local club and cricket for the Authors XI. He was for a long time a panelist on the Radio 4 literary quiz ‘The Write Stuff’ and has published two selection of parodies from the show under the title Pistache and Pistache Returns. In 2010 he presented a four-part series on BBC-2 on great characters in the British novel, Faulks on Fiction. He was appointed CBE in 2002, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
SHAILAJA MENON works as faculty in the area of Language and Literacy at the School of Education, Azim Premji University. She currently leads a longitudinal project, Literacy Research in Indian Languages (LiRIL), investigating the teaching and learning of early language and literacy in Maharashtra and Karnataka. She is also a key anchor of the bilingual children’s literature festival, KathaVana that is hosted annually by Azim Premji University. She has an abiding interest in imparting a love for language, literature and literacy to children, teachers and teacher educators.
Shamya Dasgupta has been a journalist – on the web, in print and on TV – focussing primarily on sport for close to two decades and is currently Senior Editor with Wisden India. He has authored three books, Bhiwani Junction: The Untold Story of Boxing in India, Cricket Changed My Life: Stories of Hope and Despair from the IPL and Elsewhere and Don’t Disturb the Dead: The Story of the Ramsay Brothers. He lives in Bangalore with his wife and dog.
Chaudhuri, Shantanu Ray is managing editor at HarperCollins Publishers India. He has been in publishing for just over a decade and has edited books by some of India’s leading authors, including Manu Joseph, Anita Nair, Gulzar, among others. At Harper, he has also been responsible for building the list on books on cinema. Books commissioned by him have won the National Award Swarna Kamal for Best Book on Cinema for two years running, 2011 and 2012. He is also the author of a book of poems Whims (published by Writers Workshop) and a book of essays on cinema Icons from Bollywood (Penguin). He also founded and edited a film magazine Lights Camera Action for a year in 2000.
Sharankumar Limbale (Dr) is a Marathi language author, poet and literary critic. He has penned more than 40 books, but is best known for his autobiographical novel Akkarmashi. Akkarmashi is translated in several other Indian languages and in English. The English translation is published by the Oxford University Press with the title The Outcaste. His critical work Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature (2004) is considered among the most important works on Dalit literature. As of 2012, Limbale works as a regional director of Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University for Pune region.
Shobhaa De has monitored and written extensively on India’s socio-cultural-political contours for over four decades. Her twenty books include several bestsellers like Starry Nights, Spouse, Superstar India and now, her latest, Seventy.... and to hell with it! She is a prolific writer, columnist, blogger, social commentator and opinion shaper with a vast Twitter following of close to three million. It is often said that one tweet from her can – and does – shake up Parliament. Her feisty, irreverent style has made her a powerful icon, widely respected for her fearless and independent opinions.
Sitaram Yechury is a well-known politician and social worker. A member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), he was elected as the party’s General Secretary on 19 April 2015 and is a member of the politburo of CPI (M). He is also the party’s Parliamentary group leader. As a member of the Rajya Sabha, he has been on and led various committees and parliamentary forums including Committee on Home Affairs, Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture, Parliamentary Forum on Population and Public Health and the Joint Parliamentary Committee to examine matters relating to allocation and pricing of telecom licenses and spectrum. He is also the author of works like Left Hand Drive, What is this Hindu Rashtra, Socialism in 21st Century, and Editor of volumes like People’s Diary of Freedom Movement, The Great Revolt: A Left Appraisal and Global Economic Crisis: A Marxist Perspective.
Srinath Raghavan is Senior Fellow at Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. He is also a Visiting Professor of International Relations at Ashoka University. His research and writing span historical and contemporary aspects of India and the world. He is author of several books including War and Peace in Modern India: A Strategic History of the Nehru Years (2010), 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (2013), and India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939-1945 (2016). His next book, The Most Dangerous Place: The United States in South Asia, 1776 to the Present will be published by Penguin and Basic Books in 2018. He is now at work on a history of India in the long 1970s.
Sriram V has an engineering degree and an MBA under his belt but is better known for his passionate interest in Chennai’s history and Carnatic Music. He writes frequently on these subjects for The Hindu (where he has two columns – Encore, a monthly and Hidden Histories, a weekly) and Madras Musings. He is the author of over 10 books, among them Carnatic Summer; The Devadasi and The Saint: the Life and Times of Bangalore Nagarathnamma; and Fifty Historic Residences of Chennai. He pioneered the concept of heritage walks in the city in 1999 and his thematic tours of the city, on the third Sunday of each month, have become very popular. In 2014 Sriram launched Chennai Past Forward, a mobile application that makes people aware of the heritage in their surroundings.
Stalin K is a media and human rights activist, teacher, trainer and an internationally acclaimed documentary filmmaker. He is one of India’s leading exponents of community radio, campaign design and community video. In 1991, he co-founded DRISHTI, a media and human rights organisation based in Ahmedabad, India and was its Director till September 2008. He currently leads Video Volunteers, an international organisation dedicated to empowering marginalised voices by setting up community media projects around the world. Stalin has made over a dozen documentaries including the award-winning Lesser Humans and India Untouched. He is one of the leading campaigners to democratise India’s airwaves and has been in the forefront of the fight for communities’ right to own and run their own radio stations. He is passionate about gender equality and is on the Steering Committee of GirlsCount, a coalition of about 400 civil society organisations and individuals involved in stopping sex selective abortions and challenging patriarchy. He has designed more than 20 campaigns and events on various human rights issues including Cricket for Peace, Game4Change, Asia Social Forum and Making Caste Visible at UN World Conference Against Racism.
Subodh Kerkar was born in Keri, a picturesque village on the northern border of Goa. A qualified medical professional, he gave up medicine to pursue arts 30 years ago. He is an artist and an activist and uses art to comment on social, political, religious and other issues. His art practice includes paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, videos, performances and land art. He has carved a niche for himself, especially in the field of conceptual art and land art. Subodh Kerkar’s installations are heavily washed by the ocean, both literally and metaphorically. He creates his ephemeral installations using thousands of mussel shells, pebbles, palm leaves, boats, fishermen and sand. The ocean is both inside and outside his works, his master and his muse. He has exhibited widely in galleries, museums and biennales around the world and is the Founding Director of Museum of Goa (MOG). Presently, he also holds the Mario Miranda Chair as a Visiting Research Professor at Goa University. He lives and works in Goa.
Suhasini Haidar is the Diplomatic Editor of The Hindu, who writes on Foreign policy issues, and hosts a weekly online show “WorldView with Suhasini Haidar”. Prior to this, she was Foreign Affairs editor and prime time anchor in a leading private news channel. Over the course of her nearly-three-decades of reporting career, she has covered the most challenging stories & conflicts from the most diverse regions including Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Libya, Lebanon and Syria. In India, she has covered the foreign affairs beat for over a decade and her domestic assignments include political profiles and in-depth reportage from conflict zones including Kashmir, where she was injured in a bomb blast in 2000. She is a receipient of the ‘Prem Bhatia’ award in 2015, and has won a series of awards for her work.
SURESH MENON became the youngest Sports Editor and then one of the youngest editors in the country with Indian Express. Today, he is one of India’s best known columnists on cricket, and his writings on politics, literature and sport have a global audience. As an author, his works include Champions! How the World Cup was Won (Harper Sport) and Bishan: Portrait of a Cricketer (Penguin India). He also edited the anthologies Sachin: Genius Unplugged (Krabmedia And Westland), and Pataudi: Nawab of Cricket (Harper Sport). Suresh is currently the Editor of Wisden India Almanack, the first edition of which was released in December 2012.
SURESH SESHADRI is the National Business Editor at The Hindu, where he has been since September 2015. An amateur distance runner, he likes to evangelise running and can spend hours talking about the discipline.
SUSHILA RAVINDRANATH joined Business India in Mumbai as a staff writer when business was still a bad word and and Business Week famously called the country an elephant on an oil spill. She moved to Chennai in the mid 1980s and has done stories on many South Indian groups, which were publicity-shy and had never been written about. She set up Business India bureaus in all the Southern cities. She helped launch Hansazone website, an entertainment portal for R K Swamy BBDO, before she moved to the New Sunday Express as its editor. She is now a consulting editor for Financial Express and is completing a book on post-liberalisation Tamil Nadu.
Swapan Dasgupta is a Member Of Parliament (Rajya Sabha) and public policy analyst with over 30 years of experience. An alumni of St Stephen’s College, a Ph.D from the School of Oriental & African Studies (London) and a former Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, he has been connected with various media organisations. A columnist for Times of India, The Telegraph, Pioneer and Open magazine, he also serves on various official committees. He is a recipient of the Padma Bhushan (2015) and was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 2016
Swati Chaturvedi is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist who has worked for The Statesman, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times and Zee news. Her first book, Daddy’s Girl, a murder mystery was published by Penguin Random House in September 2016.Her second, a non-fiction investigation was published in December 2016 to international acclaim. I am a Troll: Inside the BJP’s secret digital army has received wide coverage for it’s investigation into how the party in power is paying to abuse citizens in a democracy. Swati has been regularly contributing investigative stories and analysis to NDTV.com, DailyO (India Today), The Wire and Hindu Business Line. She maintains a lively and engaged presence on social media
T Sanathanan is a visual artist who lives and works in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. His work has been exhibited widely in Sri Lanka and at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, Vancouver; Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane; Museum of Ethnology, Vienna; Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi, Asian Art Archive, Hong Kong; Kochi Art Biennial, Museum of Modern Art , New York among others. His book projects include The One Year Drawing Project, The Incomplete Thombu, and A–Z of Conflict (forthcoming). He holds degrees in painting from the University of Delhi and a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Art History, Department of Fine Arts, Jaffna University and co-funder of Sri Lankan archive for contemporary art, architecture and design.
T.M. KRISHNA or Thodur Madabusi Krishna is a pre-eminent Karnatik vocalist and public intellectual who speaks and writes about issues affecting the human condition and matters of culture. Krishna has started and is involved with many organisations that work across the spectrum of music and culture. He has co-authored Voices Within: Carnatic Music – Passing on an Inheritance, a book dedicated to the greats of Karnatik music. A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story won the 2014 Tata Literature Award for Best First Book in the non-fiction category. His latest book Sebastian and Sons received the Tata Lit Live Award for the Best Non-Fiction book for 2020. In 2016, Krishna received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in recognition of ‘his forceful commitment as artist and advocate to art’s power to heal India’s deep social divisions’. He has collaborated with contemporary Tamil writer Perumal Murugan to bring his poetry onto the ‘classical’ stage and also brought the poetry of social reformer and philosopher, Sree Narayana Guru, into the Karnatik fold. In collaboration with Ashoka University, T.M. Krishna is now involved in The Edict Project, an attempt to reimagine Ashoka’s edicts in musical form.
Teesta Setalvad is a senior journalist, educationist and activist who has worked with several Indian publications since 1983. She launched Communalism Combat in 1993, along with her colleague and husband, Javed Anand and continues to co-edit it. Setalvad has exposed the communalisation within India’s law and order machinery since the early 1990s including the partisan behaviour of sections of the Indian police during outbreaks of communal violence. Since November 26, 2015, Communalism Combat has been re-launched online to a webportal Sabrangindia.in Twenty three years of valuable archival material is available on the site. She has extensively analysed and documented the build up to the conflict in Gujarat since 1991. Trained in law, Setalvad was also convenor of the Concerned Citizens Tribunal—Crimes Against Humanity headed by Justices Krishna Iyer, PB Sawant and Hosbet Suresh among other eminent academicians and activists that had conducted an investigation into the genocidal carnage. Since April 2002, she along with concerned citizens of Mumbai set up Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) a civil rights group to give quality and sustained legal aid to victims of mass crimes. She is secretary to CJP and its chief functionary. Setalvad is also an educationist working on issues related to pluralism and democratic values in the curriculum especially related to the teaching of history and social studies. Khoj, India’s only secular education programme is working extensively on the issue of broadening the boundaries of history and social sciences teaching.
Tehzeeb Katari’s passion for theatre and poetry has been a constant. From a background in design, to running NUR, an NGO that focusses on education primarily of girls, Tehzeeb was a regular on the English language stage in Mumbai, where she worked with many of the early movers of Bombay theatre, like Pearl Padamsee, Arun Sachdev, and Hoshi Vasunia, to name a few. Later, in Chennai, she has had the privilege of working with some wonderful directors, including Vimal Bhagat, Bhagirathi Narayanan, Mithran Devanesen, NSYamuna, PC Ramakrishna and Michael Muthu. Some of her notable productions were Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolf, Faith Healer, Witness for the Prosecution.
Terri-Ann White has worked within the fields of books and ideas all of her working life, one that has included bookselling, writing and editing, teaching, establishing a university centre for cross-disciplinary studies, and now publishing. She spends a large part of each year following, ecstatically, new writing and artistic expression, particularly on the field of contemporary dance.
TIMERI N. MURARI was for many years a journalist writing for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and Observer in London before he moved to New York, where he made documentary films for British television. He has written 18 books of fiction and non-fiction. His bestselling Taj: A Story of Mughal India (Aleph Book Co.) has been translated into 25 languages. The Taliban Cricket Club (HarperCollins) was published in the U.S., Canada, UK, Australia and translated into French, Norwegian, Dutch, Spanish, Romanian. He is also the writer and producer of the award-winning film, “The Square Circle”, which was voted as one of the “ten best films of the year” by TIME Magazine in 1997. He adapted it for the stage and directed it as the Leicester Harmarket theatre with Parminder Nagra in the lead role. In 2002, he was presented with the R.K. Narayan Award for his contributions to writing, cinema and theatre.
Tishani Doshi is a poet, novelist and dancer based in Chennai. She is a regular contributor to The Hindu.
V Geetha is a feminist historian, translator and publisher. She is the Editorial Director, Tara Books, and has written widely in Tamil and English on caste, gender, labour, education and culture. Her published works include Undoing Impunity: Speech after Sexual Violence (2016); Another History of the Children’s Picturebook: from Soviet Lithuania to India (with Giedre Janakviciute, 2017); Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: from Iyothee Thass to Periyar (with S V Rajadurai, 1998). Her translations include: The Truth about Me by A Revathi and Perumal Murugan’s Koolla Madari (translated as Seasons of the Palm) and Nizhal Muttram (translated as Current Show).
Vaasanthi is a freelance journalist and writer based in Delhi. Formerly Editor, India Today Tamil, her articles have appeared in The Indian Express, The Hindu, Deccan Herald, Tehelka, Swagat, Media Transasia, The Week, India Today, Open and several online magazines. She has also published thirty novels, six short-story collections, four volumes of articles and four travelogues in Tamil. Her works have been translated in Malayalam, Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, English, Norwegian, Czech and Dutch. Two of her novels were made into films in Malayalam. Her book on Tamil Nadu politics, Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars: The World of Tamil Politics was published in 2006. Her biography of Tamil Nadu’s former Chief Minister Jayalalithaa: A Portrait (2012) received a court injunction against its release. A more recent biography is Amma: A Journey from a Movie Star to a Political Queen (2016).
Vaishna Roy is a Sr Deputy Editor with The Hindu, and writes on books, society and culture. She authors a fortnightly column called ‘Woman, Uninterrupted’ in Melange, besides editing the newspaper’s cinema and property supplements
Victor Mallet is a journalist, commentator and author with three decades of experience in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He is currently Asia news editor for the Financial Times, and was bureau chief in South Asia, based in New Delhi, for the four years from 2012-2016. His new book about the Ganges, River of Life, River of Death: The Ganges and India’s Future was released in October 2017. His highly praised book on the south-east Asian industrial revolution and the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, The Trouble with Tigers was first published in 1999. Victor Mallet has written numerous editorials, columns and features on security, politics, economics and business. He twice won the Society of Publishers in Asia (Sopa) award for opinion writing. In India, he was twice awarded the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism as a foreign correspondent, once for a feature about the rise of Narendra Modi and later for a magazine article on the River Ganges.
Vidya Gajapathi Raju Singh, Princess of Vijayanagaram, is a Rotarian, and was the President of the International Women’s Association, and also the President of Soroptomist International. She runs Sumyog, a wedding planning company based in Chennai, and Senhati Eventz, an event management company that handles product launches, book launches, and fashion shows. She is a patron of the Karunnaii School for destitute mentally disabled children, and has organised several fund-raising events. Vidya captained the Madras University Tennis team and has won several medals in Masters Swimming Championships at the State and National Levels. She is an avid trekker and bicyclist. She has been a fitness columnist for the Economic Times, The Madras Plus, Eve’s Touch, Chennai Frappe, Apollo Life, B_ Positive and At a Glance. She has also contributed guest columns to newspapers like The New Indian Express. Vidya has been Brand Ambassador for ACE, Apollo Hospitals Centre for Excellence. She was featured in Vogue’s June 2013 issue, in the list of India’s 50 Best Dressed.
VIDYA MANI is a children’s writer and editor, who wears many hats. She runs a content and design studio called Melting Pot that creates children’’s books and magazines for publishers and NGOs. She is one of the founder-members of Bookalore, a Bangalore-based children’s book club. She runs a travelling bookshop called Funky Rainbow that puts out a curated collection of Indian children’s books at various events. She is also the managing editor of the children’s book review site, Goodbooks.
Vidya Virkar, Managing Partner of the iconic Strand Book Stall in Mumbai, is the daughter of Padmashri T.N. Shanbhag, the renowned bookseller. After an eclectic career spanning television production in Mumbai, genetic engineering in Cambridge, editing in Holland and advertising in London, Vidya returned to India to help continue the Strand legacy. She opened several Strand stores in Bangalore and other cities. Probably the first person to hold book readings and book launches in India, Vidya also introduced the concept of mega book festivals where literally tens of thousands of titles at great prices beckoned the reader. The Strand Book Festivals became cult events in Mumbai and Bangalore. Recently however, in keeping with global trends, she has had to close the other stores but continues the flagship store in Mumbai against great odds.
Vishal Bhardwaj is an Indian film director, writer, composer and producer. He has directed nine feature films, produced five and composed music for more than forty. His directorial work includes Makdee, The Blue Umbrella, Kaminey, 7 Khoon Maaf, Matru Ki Bijli Ka Mandola, Rangoon as well as the internationally acclaimed Shakespeare Trilogy - Maqbool, Omkara and Haider (adapted from Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet, respectively). He has received three international awards and seven national film awards for his work and recently, he has begun his stage career by directing A Flowering Tree in the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, and composing music for the Monsoon Wedding musical in Berkeley, California.
Vivek Shanbhag writes in Kannada. He has published five short story collections, three novels and two plays, and has edited two anthologies, one of them in English. For seven years from 2005 to 2012, he published and edited the literary journal Desha Kaala. His acclaimed novel Ghachar Ghochar was published in English translation in 2015. He was a Fall 2016 resident at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. An engineer by training, Vivek Shanbhag lives in Bengaluru.
