A.J. Thomas is an Indian English poet, author, translator and editor. He was Editor of Indian Literature and is its Guest Editor now. He taught English in Benghazi University, Ajdabiya, Libya from 2008 to 2014. He was also a Senior Consultant at IGNOU. Some of his major contributions include Germination (Poetry, 1989); Aagami Pal Ka Nirman (his poetry in Hindi translation, 2010); Bhaskara Pattelar and Other Stories, (1993) and Reflections of a Hen in Her Last Hour and Other Stories, both collections of Paul Zacharia’s stories in translation along with others; translations of the important works of Jnanpith awardee Malayalam poet ONV Kurup; Best of Indian Literature, a four-volume anthology of Indian literatures in 1600 pages, which he co-edited; Like A Psalm, translation of Perumpadavam Sreedharan’s iconic novel, Oru Sankeerthanam Pole; and several others. His poems and essays have appeared in national and international anthologies and publications. He is the recipient of the Katha Award, the AKMG Prize (which enabled him to tour USA, UK and Europe in 1997) and the Vodafone Crossword Award (2007). He is a Senior Fellow, Department of Culture, Government of India and Honorary Fellow, Department of Culture, Government of South Korea. He has been invited as a speaker in writers’ conferences and readings in South Korea, Australia, Thailand, Hong Kong and Nepal.
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.
Aadhavan Dheetchanya is a Tamil poet and author. He has to his credit collections of poetry, short stories and essays. He is also the Deputy General Secretary of the Tamil Nadu Progressive Writers’ Artists Association and the State Secretary of the Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front. His works include Meesai Enthapathum Verum Mayir and Enchiya Sol.
Aamer Hussein, born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, spent 18 months at school in Ooty before moving to London for further education. He graduated from SOAS and began to write in the mid-1980s. His first volume of stories, Mirror to the Sun, appeared in 1993. His works of fiction published in India include the volumes of short stories The Blue Direction (1999), Insomnia (2009), and 37 Bridges (2015); and the novels Another Gulmohar Tree (2009) and The Cloud Messenger (2011). His most recent collection, Hermitage, has just appeared in Pakistan. Hussein was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004. He writes in both English and Urdu and spends his time between London and Karachi.
Aanchal Malhotra is an artist, writer and oral historian living in Delhi. Her seminal research, titled Remnants of a Separation, is a material study of the Partition of India, based on objects that were carried across either side of the border during 1947. It began as a photographic archive and has been exhibited at various galleries across India, Canada and the UK, and digitally at the Google Cultural Institute. She is also the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory, a digital repository of material culture of the Indian subcontinent, tracing family histories and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles and objects of antiquity. She can be found at her photoblog, The Hiatus Project, which chronicles her love affair with the city of Delhi.
ABDULLAH KHAN, a Mumbai-based screenwriter, novelist, literary critic, and banker, has contributed to numerous South Asian, American, and British literary journals and newspapers including The Hindu, Brooklyn Rail, Wasafiri, Frontline, Outlook among others. His debut novel, Patna Blues, has been translated into 10 languages worldwide. His second novel, A Man from Motihari, was published in April 2023.
Aditya Mukherjee retired as Professor of Contemporary Indian History, JNU, New Delhi. He was Dean, School of Social Sciences, JNU, and President (Modern India) of the Indian History Congress. He has been Visiting Professor at Duke University, the US, the Universities of Rome and Tokyo, and Fellow at the Institutes of Advanced Study at Nantes, France, Sao Paulo, Brazil and Lancaster, UK. He is the author of Imperialism, Nationalism and the Making of the Indian Capitalist Class, and has co-authored the best sellers Struggle for India’s Independence and India Since Independence and RSS School Texts and the Murder of Mahatma Gandhi: The Hindu Communal Project. He has edited several volumes of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, and Volume V of A Centenary History of the Indian National Congress, 1964-84.
Akhila Ramnarayan (Dr) is a writer, independent scholar, theatre actor, and trained Carnatic vocalist with a PhD in postcolonial studies from The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, the US. She has taught at the University of Dayton (US), and Asian College of Journalism (Chennai), was Learning and Development Manager at Pramati Technologies, Chennai and the Krea University. A key member of JustUs Repertory and founder member of Sahrdaya Foundation, she performs a variety of roles in both: acting, writing, dramaturgy, research, singing, music composition, production, social media design/marketing, and administration. She has received national recognition for theatre (acting) as the 2013-2014 awardee of the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar.
Amitabha Bagchi is the author of three critically-acclaimed novels: Above Average, The Householder and This Place. His first novel, Above Average, has sold 25,000 copies since it was published in 2007. Amitabha grew up and went to school and college in Delhi, where he now lives with his wife and son.
Anamika Haksar graduated from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, with a Bachelor’s in History, and from the National School of Drama, New Delhi, where she studied under BV Karanth. Between 1982 and 1988, she studied at the State Institute of Theatrical Arts, Moscow (USSR), and specialised in Direction and received the Diploma of Excellence in Theatre Direction. In 1995, she received the Sanskriti award for contribution to new theatre language. In 2013, Anamika directed her debut short film Pagdandi. Her Composition on Water was a performance and installation based on texts from Dalit writers, including Namdeo Dhasal’s Water, was part of the Kochi Muziris Biennale. Her debut film Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon was selected for the MAMI and Dharamshala International Film Festivals. She has directed many theatre productions, taught and conducted workshops across the country.
Anjum Hasan is the author of the novels The Cosmopolitans, Neti, Neti and Lunatic in my Head; the short story collections A Day in the Life and Difficult Pleasures; and the book of poems Street on the Hill. Her books have been nominated for various awards including the Man Asian Literary Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, The Hindu Prize and the Crossword Fiction Award. Her short stories, essays and poems are widely published.
Anuradha Roy is the author of Sleeping on Jupiter, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015 and has been shortlisted for the DSC Prize 2016. She won the Economist Crossword Prize for Fiction for The Folded Earth. Her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, has been widely translated and was picked as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and the Seattle Times. It has been named by World Literature Today as one of the 60 most essential books on modern India and was shortlisted for the Crossword Prize. Anuradha won the Picador-Outlook Non-Fiction Prize in 2004 for her essay, “Cooking Women”. She works as a designer at Permanent Black, an independent press which she runs with her husband, Rukun Advani
“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. “
Arun Shourie is among India’s best-known commentators on current and political affairs. Born in Jalandhar, Punjab (1941), he studied at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi and obtained his doctorate in Economics from Syracuse University, the US. Among other portfolios, he held the office of the Minister of Disinvestment, Communications and Information Technology in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s cabinet. He was acclaimed as a “Star of Asia” by Business Week in 2002, as “The Business Leader of the Year” by The Economic Times jury for his pioneering and dogged work on privatisation. In a poll of Indian CEOs, he was acclaimed as “The Most Outstanding Minister” of the Vajpayee Government in early 2004. He is the recipient of numerous national and international awards, including the Magsaysay Award and the Padma Bhushan. He has been an economist with the World Bank, and Editor of the Indian Express. He is widely regarded as the initiator of Investigative Journalism in India. The International Press Institute, Vienna, acclaimed him as one of 50 “World Press Freedom Heroes” whose work has sustained freedom of the press in the last half-century. He has written over 25 books on a variety of topics ranging from constitutional law, modern Indian history, religious fundamentalism, governance in India, to national security. His book, Does He Know a Mother’s Heart?: How suffering refutes religions examines explanations for suffering in the basic religious texts. His book Two Saints: Speculations around and about Ramakrishna Paramhamsa and Ramana Maharshi examines the experiences of these saints in the light of neuroscience, psychology and sociology. His latest book, Anita Gets Bail: What are our courts doing? What can we do about them?, is a critique of the functioning and judgments of the Supreme Court and High Courts.
Aruna Sairam is a Carnatic vocalist, composer, collaborator, humanitarian, and speaker. In addition to her performances in India, Aruna has taken Carnatic music to the global arena at prestigious venues including the Royal Albert Hall and Carnegie Hall. Currently Vice-Chairperson of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, Delhi, she was appointed as Advisor to the State Department of Culture in 2008 by the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. Aruna works for the musical education of underprivileged students, through the Nadayogam Trust, which she founded in 2011. Aruna was the first to incorporate abhang, a Western Indian musical form, into a traditional, South Indian concert. By interacting with national and international musicians, Aruna communicates beyond regional contexts, using melody as a language of human expression. Her many awards include the Padma Shri and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award.
“Arunava Sinha is a translator of classic and contemporary Bengali fiction. His latest published translations are The Chieftain’s Daughter by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Three Women by Rabindranath Tagore. His earlier translations include What Really Happened and Other Stories by Banaphool, By The Tungabhadra by Saradindu Bandyopadhyay, Striker Stopper by Moti Nandy, and My Kind of Girl by Buddhadeva Bose. His translation of Shankar’s Chowringhee won the Vodafone-Crossword Translation Prize in 2007 and was shortlisted for the Independent Best Foreign Fiction Prize in UK in 2009. “
Audrey Truschke is Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. She received her PhD in 2012 from Columbia University and held positions at Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge and at Stanford University before joining the History Department at Rutgers-Newark in 2015. Her research focuses on the cultural, imperial, and intellectual history of medieval and early modern India. Her first book, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (2016), investigates the literary, social, and political roles of Sanskrit as it thrived in the Persian-speaking, Islamic Mughal courts from 1560 to 1650. Her second book, Aurangzeb: The Man and The Myth (2017), is a historical reassessment of one of the most hated kings in South Asian history (published in North America as Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King). More broadly she publishes on cross-cultural exchanges, historical memory, and imperial power.
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.
Bharati Chaturvedi, writer and environmentalist, is the founder of Chintan, an India-based non-profit that advocates for consumption that does not take a toll on the environment or the poor. Its focus is on enabling the informal recycling sector — wastepickers, kabaris and recyclers — to proactively participate in solving India’s mounting trash problem. In September 2014, Bharati was recognised by ASSOCHAM and Rai University for her work and received the Women Grassroots Entrepreneur of the Decade. Most recently, Chintan was awarded the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award for its work. Chintan has also been awarded the US Secretary of State’s Award for Innovation for the Empowerment of Women and Girls in 2012; the third place at the UN-BMW Inter-Cultural Innovation Award in 2013, was awarded by Google in 2013 and has received a special mention by the President of the Republic of France for its work on defending human rights in 2014. Bharati is on various government committees for policy making. Her column GreenPiece, on environmental issues, appears in the Hindustan Times. She has a Master’s degree in History from Delhi University and a Master’s in International Public Policy from the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. She is the editor of Finding Delhi: Loss and Renewal in the Megacity, (October 2010). She is the recipient of the prestigious 2009 Johns Hopkins Alumni “Knowledge for the World Award”. She has previously received the LEAD fellowship and is a fellow at the Synergos Institute, New York.
C Mahendran began his journey in Communist Party of India at the age of 19. He started his political career from the All India Student Federation (AISF) and All India Student Federation Youth (AISFY). He acted as the Communist Party State Assistant Secretary for a long time. He is now the National Executive Member of CPI. He has been the editor of Thamarai, a literary magazine founded by Jeevanantham, for the past 20 years. Mahendran also has a literary side, as evinced by his popular books like Theekul Viralai Vaithaen, Oru Vannnathu Poochiyin Marana Sasanam, amd Veelvaen Endru Ninaithayo. He has written more than 500 articles in prominent magazines and journals. The highlight of his political career was when he contested against the former chief minister J Jayalalitha in the RK Nagar by-elections in 2015.
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.
Chef Alfred Prasad was born in Wardha (central India) and lived all over the sub-continent, which expanded his mind to the immense possibilities of eclectic Indian cuisines. Alfred worked with leading hotels and restaurants in India before moving to the UK in 1999. He joined Tamarind of Mayfair (London) in 2001 as Sous Chef and progressed to Executive Chef within a year. In 2002, Alfred earned the honour of being the youngest Indian chef to receive a Michelin star at 29 years. He has held the Michelin star for thirteen years along with several other accolades. His culinary philosophy is all about Heritage, Health and Happiness. He is highly lauded for his original take on traditional Indian cuisine. Alfred provides consultancy services to establishments in the UK like Gleaneagles (Scotland), MCC Lord’s (London) Cobra Molson Coors (UK), Ennismore- Tandoor Chop House (London), Suvlaki (Soho, Shoreditch, London). In January 2018, he launched OMYA at The Oberoi New Delhi, which is Inspired by India’s culinary history. In November 2018, he collaborated with Sumeru, to create and launch a gourmet range of frozen-fresh products in India. Alfred actively supports organisations like Action against hunger, Akshaya Patra, Fairtrade Foundation, Food Cycle and Slow Food UK.
Chef Thomas Zacharias, or ChefTZac, is an acclaimed chef with almost 15 years of professional cooking experience. His culinary journey began in his grandmother’s kitchen in Kerala. He graduated at the top of his class at the Welcomgroup Graduate School of Hotel Administration, Manipal, before honing his skills at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), New York. He then worked under Chef Eric Ripert at the three-star Michelin restaurant, Le Bernardin. In 2014, a transformative culinary expedition across India reshaped his approach to food, inspiring him to become Chef-Partner at The Bombay Canteen, Mumbai. In April 2022, he founded The Locavore, a transformative platform centred around the idea of Doing Good Through Food in India and emerged not only as a chef but also a visionary, connecting people and food, cultivating awareness around sustainability, and empowering individuals to be agents of positive change through their food choices.
Chef Vikramjit Roy is now Corporate Chef for White Hat Hospitality, which has restaurants like Whisky Samba & The Wine Company in NCR, The Wine Rack in Mumbai and Antares in Goa. He has been rated ‘Chef of the Year’ in 2014 and 2017. Chef Vikramjit Roy was responsible for the opening of restaurants like Pan Asian at the ITC Grand Chola Hotel, Chennai; Tian: Asian Cuisine Studio at ITC Maurya Hotel, New Delhi; Wasabi by Morimoto at the Taj Mahal Hotel, New Delhi, which was listed as the 54th best restaurant in the world by San Pellegrino. With a degree in Hotel Management and Catering Technology from IIHM, Calcutta and in International Hospitality and Tourism from Queen Margaret University College, UK, he started his career with the Oberoi Hotels, New Delhi, where he worked in the trend-setting 360°, Travertino and Taipan, and also at Hyatt, Intercontinental, Okura in Tokyo. His awards include four consecutive Times Food Awards for best Japanese restaurant, three consecutive HT City crystals awards, Vir Sanghvi Awards, and Mail Today’s 101 best restaurants awards. He was the co-founder and Head Chef of Progressive Oriental House, in Mumbai.
Chiké Frankie Edozien grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and learned to read from the newspapers his father brought home. He grew up to become an ink-stain scribbler telling stories of lives in the big city that were often unnoticed. Edozien now teaches journalism at New York University. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Quartz, Time Magazine, The Times (UK) GlobalPost, Out Traveler, and more. Edozien is the author of the groundbreaking memoir, Lives of Great Men: Living & Loving as an African Gay Man, a 2018 Lambda Literary Award winner. He is a contributor to the 2016 Commonwealth Writers anthology, Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction.
CHINMAYI SRIPADA is an award-winning playback singer, trained primarily in Indian classical music. She won the prestigious CCRT scholarship for young talent when she was eight and the AIR gold and silver medals for Ghazal and Hindustani Classical music respectively in 2000 and 2002. She won the Tamil Nadu State Film Award for Kannathil Muthamittaal and the Nandi award for best dubbing artist for Ye Maaya Chesave (Telugu). She is an accomplished dubbing artiste and has served as an RJ and a VJ. Chinmayi founded and runs Blue Elephant, a language services company. In 2011 she was selected for the US State Department Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership and was later invited to attend the Fortune Most Powerful Women’s summit as a mentee of the programme in October 2011.
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
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning writer and teacher, and the author of 22 books such as Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, Palace of Illusions, The Forest of Enchantments, The Last Queen, and Independence. Her newest book is a biography, An Uncommon Love: The Early Life of Sudha and Narayan Murthy. Her work has been translated into 30 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali, Hungarian, Turkish, Hindi and Japanese, made into films, plays and dance dramas, and performed as operas. Her awards include an American Book Award, a PEN Josephine Miles award, a Premio Scanno, and a Light of India award. The Economic Times has included her in their list of 20 Most Influential Global Indian Women. She has been an activist in the fields of education and domestic violence for many years and is the McDavid professor of Creative Writing in the internationally acclaimed Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.
Daniel Handler is the author of six novels, including Why We Broke Up, We Are Pirates and, most recently, All The Dirty Parts. As Lemony Snicket, he is responsible for numerous books for children, including the thirteen-volume A Series Of Unfortunate Events, the four-volume All The Wrong Questions, and The Dark, which won the Charlotte Zolotow Award. He has received commissions from the San Francisco Symphony and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has collaborated with artist Maira Kalman on a series of books for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, including Girls Standing on Lawns, Hurry Up and Wait and Weather, Weather. His books have sold more than 70 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages, and have been adapted for film, stage and television. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the illustrator Lisa Brown, with whom he has collaborated on several books and one son.
Devaki Jain is a feminist writer and economist.
Dhalavai Sundaram, as Associate Editor with Puthiya Thalaimurai magazine, is a journalist and short story writer and is He hails from a modest agricultural family in Uralvaimozhi, a small village in Tirunelveli district. He worked as a librarian in Roja Muthiah Research Library and then as sub-editor in publications like Kumudam, Vikatan and Kizhaku. Saavai Azhaithukondu Varubavaval (The Girl Who Brings Death) is his celebrated short story collection and his doctorate was on the subject of ‘Portrayal of Criminals in Tamil Print Media’. He was inspired to write by NaMuthusamy.
Dr K Parthibaraja is an assistant professor, Department of Tamil, Sacred Heart College, Tirupattur. He has been researching Therukoothu from 1997 and has published articles about that art form in leading Tamil journals. He has published a book about Oyilattam in 2005. His awards include the Sadhbhavana National Award (1995), Best Short Story Writer from TASNA, Tamil Nadu (1996), Prof Na Vaanamaaalai Research Award (2012) and Naataka Panichelvan (2012).
Dr. Ennapadam S. Krishnamoorthy is a Behavioural Neurologist and Neuropsychiatrist. The founder of Buddhi Clinic and a pioneer of integrated and holistic care and rehabilitation for the brain and mind, he has taken on multiple international leadership roles in treating epilepsy, dementia and in the field of clinical neuropsychiatry. He is the immediate past president of the International Neuropsychiatric Association (INA) and the editor of the Global Approach series for Cambridge University Press, He has to his credit 70 plus publications, 30 plus book chapters and over 25 articles in the lay press. He is Adjunct Professor at Manipal University and Public Health Foundation India. He is also Senior Clinical Advisor, Neurosciences, Apollo Hospitals Group.
Elizabeth Flock is a journalist, author and documentary filmmaker with a focus on women’s and social issues. Her first book, Love and Marriage in Mumbai, is a study of contemporary marriage in India, told through the stories of three couples she followed over the course of a decade. A New York Times’ Editors Pick, the book has been called a” vivid portrait of a nation in transition” (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review), “deeply sympathetic but unsentimental” (NPR) and “impossible to put down” (Washington Post). Her features and investigations have appeared in the PBS NewsHour, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Hindu, The Hindustan Times, Forbes India, and many other publications.
Farahnaz Ispahani is Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and served as a member of Pakistan’s Parliament.
Gayathri Prabhu is the author of the memoir If I Had to Tell It Again (HarperCollins, 2017) and the novels The Untitled (Fourth Estate, HarperCollins, 2016), Birdswim Fishfly (Rupa Publications, 2006), and Maya (Indialog Publications, 2003). She teaches literary studies at the Manipal Centre for Humanities.
Githa Hariharan has written novels, short fiction and essays over the last three decades. Her highly- acclaimed work includes The Thousand Faces of Night, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in 1993; the short story collection The Art of Dying; and the novels The Ghosts of Vasu Master; When Dreams Travel; In Times of Siege; and Fugitive Histories. Hariharan also edited A Southern Harvest and From India to Palestine: Essays in Solidarity. Her own collection of essays called Almost Home: Cities and Other Places has just been published by HarperCollins India. Hariharan’s fiction has been translated into a number of languages. She has been Visiting Professor or Writer-in-Residence in several universities. She is currently Writer-in-Residence in Singapore.
Gnana Rajasekaran was an officer in the Indian Administrative Service (Kerala Cadre, 1983 Batch). He held positions such as District Collector of Thrissur; Director of Sports and Youth Affairs; Director of Rajiv Gandhi National Institute of Youth Development (Govt. of India); Chairman, Kerala State Electricity Board; Regional Officer, Central Board of Film Certification; and Secretary to Government in Power, Transport, Labor, Culture, Information and Public Relations Departments. He has made five feature films: Mogha Mul, Mugham, Bharati, Periyar, and Ramanujam, which have won national and international awards and short films in Tamil and Malayalam. He has also written a novel Yanai, Kuthirai, Ottagam and Vayiru, a collection of three plays. His awards include the Periyar Award from the Tamil Nadu State Government and Bharathi Award, Bharati Sangham, Tamil Nadu.
GOPALKRISHNA GANDHI is Distinguished Professor of History at Ashoka University, Sonepat, Haryana. His working career has been in public administration, diplomacy, and the exercise of constitutional responsibility. His published works include Refuge, a novel; Dara Shukoh, a play in English verse; The Oxford India Gandhi (ed.); The Tirukkural, a rendering in contemporary English verse of G.U. Pope’s translation of the Tamil classic; Abolishing the Death Penalty; Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: Restless as Mercury (ed.); I am an Ordinary Man: Gandhi (1914-1948) (ed.). He has also translated Vikram Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy into Hindustani.
GOWRI RAMNARAYAN (DR) was a journalist with The Hindu for 23 years, and vocal accompanist to the legendary Carnatic musician MS Subbulakshmi for 17 years. She has translated two plays by Vijay Tendulkar, as also short stories by Kalki Krishnamurti, authored books, and served on the Fipresci Jury at international film festivals. As playwright, theatre director, and founder of JustUs Repertory, Dr Ramnarayan is a rare amalgam of aesthetics and scholarship. Her witty, thought-provoking, often moving plays make original use of music, dance and the visual arts. Her Dark Horse won two national awards (META) and a dramatised reading of her Night’s End by Swedish actors was showcased at an international playwrights conference in Stockholm. Recipient of the Nataka Choodamani and Mohan Khokar Awards for excellence, she has presented a series of lectures and theatre workshops at several north American Universities, and toured the US with her dance, music and theatre productions.
Harikrishnan Sankaran was born and brought up in Palayamkottai, Tirunelveli District. He developed a love for elocution and theatre in college and won awards in many competitions. Travelling for these competitions also exposed him to new experiences, especially with regard to food and culture. This is what led to his popular show Kojum Soru Konjam Varalaru. He worked briefly as a reporter in Kumudam but has spent most of his career in television, having worked with production houses like Minbimbangal and Radaan. He has written the screenplay for and directed many popular mega serials. He worked in Puthiya Thalaimurai TV as Producer of Programming and is now with Colors Tamil TV as Fiction Supervising Producer.
Harsh Sethi was the Consulting Editor of Seminar for over 20 years. He worked briefly with Sage as Acquisitions Editor. He was a Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Developing Societies. He was earlier the Deputy Director of the Indian Council of Social Science Research
Helmut Schippert has been the Director of the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan Chennai since June 2014. Having graduated from Heidelberg University in English and Sports, he has also qualified himself in German Studies and has always been keenly involved with Philosophy and Politics. Starting his career as a teacher, he joined the Goethe-Institut, Germany’s cultural institute world-wide, in 1985. After a short mission in Egypt in 1989, he went, in 1990 to Santiago de Chile in South America followed by six years in Paris from 1996- 2002 where the mission was strongly marked by the special friendship of Europe’s closest partners, France and Germany. In 2008 he was appointed Director of the Goethe-Institute’s network in Central America and the Caribbean which was managed from Mexico City which he left in 2014 for a new and different cultural experience in India. Being a specialist in international communication and cooperation, due to the alarming river and water situation in Chennai he has taken water and river ecology as a major focus for Indo-German cultural collaboration.
Himanjali Sankar grew up in Calcutta and did her Masters and MPhil in English Literature from JNU. She taught at the University of Indianapolis in the US for a couple of semesters and worked as an editor with various publishing houses in New Delhi for over a decade. Currently she works as Editorial Director with Simon & Schuster India. She is also an author, and two of her books for children were on the Crossword Award shortlist, in 2013 and 2016, respectively. Mrs C Remembers was her first novel for adults for which she won the FICCI Publishing Award for Upcoming Author of the Year: English in August 2018. She lives in Gurgaon with her dog and some humans too.
Husain Haqqani, Director for South and Central Asia at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC, was Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2011
Ira Mukhoty is the author of Akbar: The Great Mughal, Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire and Heroines: Powerful Indian Women in Myth and History. Living in one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, she developed an interest in the evolution of mythology and history, the erasure of women from these histories, and the continuing relevance this has on the status of women in India. She writes rigorously researched narrative histories that are accessible to the lay reader. She lives in Gurgaon with her husband and two daughters. Her first novel Song of Draupadi was published in August 2021.
J Devika researches and teaches at Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Her work relates to the intertwined and gendered histories of politics, social reform, development, and culture in Kerala. She translates literature from Malayalam to English, and social science writings from English to Malayalam. Her latest work of translation to English is Swarga: A Posthuman Tale, of Ambikasutan Mangad’s novel in Malayalam, Enmakaje.
Jacinta Kerketta is a young Hindi poet, freelance journalist, writer and social worker, who belongs to the Adivasi community of Jharkhand. She has two collections of poems to her credit: Angor and Land of the Roots. Her books have been published in Hindi, English, German and Italian and she has read her poems in many universities in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria.
Jai Prakash Chowdhary (also known as Santu) is one of the founders and the General Secretary of Safai Sena, a waste pickers and small waste traders’ organisation. In his late teens, he worked s in the waste sector, first as a sorter and then running a small trading enterprise of his own. He has been involved with fighting, along with several others, for the rights and dignity of waste workers.
James Crabtree is a writer, journalist and author living in Singapore. He is currently an Associate Professor of practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and a senior fellow at the school’s Centre on Asia and Globalisation. His first book, The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age, was published in July 2018. James is also a non-resident Fellow at the Asia programme at Chatham House and writes a fortnightly column for Nikkei Asian Review. Prior to moving into academia, James worked for the Financial Times, leading the newspaper’s coverage of Indian business as Mumbai bureau chief between 2011 and 2016, having previously worked on the opinion page in London, as Comment Editor. He has also written for a range of other global publications, including the New York Times, Economist, Wired, and Foreign Policy. Prior to journalism, James was a senior policy advisor in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit under Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He also worked for various think tanks in London and Washington DC and spent many years living in the United States, initially as a Fulbright Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Joeanna Rebello Fernandes is the author of Treasure at the Train Station: A Mumbai Adventure. Joeanna believes she was once an Old Building – home to a hundred different lives that sang, ate and danced within her. It explains why she’s drawn to old buildings in this life. And why her children’s book, Treasure at the Train Station, has a grand old building at the heart of it – Victoria Terminus! She writes and edits for a living.
John Keay has been writing about India for over forty years. His India: A History (2000, 2010) is the standard narrative account of South Asia’s past, while India Discovered (1981 and still in print) has inspired a generation of research into the 19th-century reconstruction of India’s classical past. Also still in print is his The Honourable Company (1991), a sweeping history of the English East India Company. His latest work is an intriguing biographical quest; The Tartan Turban: In Search of Alexander Gardner. He lives in Scotland.
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.
Joshua Pollock is a Heartfulness meditation coach and co-author of the bestselling book, The Heartfulness Way. He has conducted meditation classes across the United States, India, and Europe. Joshua is a sought-after speaker, lecturing at companies including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, the World Bank, United Nations headquarters, the New York Times, and a host of academic institutions. He has appeared on All India Radio, Doordarshan, and ABC and CBS in the United States. An accomplished classical violinist, Joshua has performed internationally as a soloist and chamber musician and collaborated with celebrated composer A.R. Rahman on numerous films including Ghajini and Delhi 6. He now resides in New Delhi.
K VijayRaghavan (Prof) is the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India and the Chairperson of Prime Minister’s Science, Technology & Innovation Advisory Council (PM-STIAC). He was Secretary, Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India from January 2013 to 2018. VijayRaghavan is also a Distinguished Professor at the National Centre of Biological Sciences (NCBS) and at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Bangalore (TIFR). He was the Director of NCBS till 2013. He studied Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and was a Senior Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. His research is on nerves and muscles and how complex behaviour emerges during animal development. VijayRaghavan is a Fellow of the Indian Science Academies, the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences (UK) and a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2013.
KALPANA SHARMA is a columnist and former deputy editor of The Hindu. In her four decades as a full-time journalist, she has also held senior positions in Himmat Weekly, Indian Express and Times of India. She is the author of Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum (Penguin India) and has edited Missing: Half the Story, Journalism as if Gender Matters (Zubaan Books). Currently, she is a columnist for The Sunday Magazine of The Hindu and an editorial consultant with The Economic and Political Weekly. Her areas of interest include environmental, developmental and gender issues.
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.
Kanimozhi Karunanidhi is a Tamil poet, journalist and politician. Currently a Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha, she is also the Secretary of the DMK’s Women’s wing. She conceptualised and organised a festival of Tamil folk arts, Chennai Sangamam, showcasing Tamil Nadu’s traditional art forms for five years. She is passionate about the welfare of marginalised people and has actively worked with the Government of Tamil Nadu to advance the cause of transgendered people and has also served as an Advisor to the Department for the Differently-abled in the Government of Tamil Nadu. She was elected President of The Hindu Employees Union Association, the first woman to hold this position. She has collections of poetry including Karuvarai Vasanai, Agathinai, Paarvaigal, Karukkum Marudhani, and Sigarangalil Uraigirathu Kaalam to her name. These have been translated into English, Italian, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu and German. She has also translated works of Tamil poets into English.
Kavitha Muralidharan is a bilingual journalist from Tamil Nadu with two decades of experience, covering a, range of issues from politics to culture and cinema. Joining News Today, a Chennai-based evening paper in 1998, she has worked with major publications including The Hindu Group, India Today and The Week. She was part of the team that launched The Hindu Tamil, heading its reporting section. She is currently an independent journalist contributing to major print and online news magazines. Kavitha volunteers with People’s Archive of Rural India as a translation coordinator and is also a PARI senior reporting fellow.
Lara Fergus grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney and gave up a science degree to become a contemporary dancer. Some years and an ankle injury later, she gave that up to see the world and wash dishes. She spent seven years living overseas, mostly in France. In that time, she completed degrees in writing, women’s studies and international law, and worked with various advocacy organisations, including for newly arrived immigrant and refugee women. Lara has worked as a researcher and writer on human rights —particularly violence against women — for two decades, with organisations such as Amnesty International, White Ribbon, VicHealth, the United Nations and the Victorian State Government on policy to prevent violence against women. Most recently she was Director of Policy and Evaluation of the Foundation to Prevent Violence against Women and Children. She lives in Melbourne with her partner Maryse, writes before work and dances on the weekends. My Sister Chaos is her first novel and she is now writing her second.
Lisa Brown is a New York Times bestselling illustrator, author and cartoonist. Her picture books include The Airport Book, How to Be, Mummy Cat by Marcus Ewert, Emily’s Blue Period by Cathleen Daly, and The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming and Goldfish Ghost, both by Lemony Snicket, to whom she is allegedly married. She lives in San Francisco and teaches in the illustration department of the California College of the Arts. Her upcoming book is a graphic novel ghost story for young people.
Madhavi Menon is Professor of English at Ashoka University, and the author, most recently, of Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India. She has also written several books on Shakespeare and queer theory, and edited Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Currently, she is working on a book about the laws governing sexuality in India, titled The Law of Desire. Her opinion pieces on desire, identity, and the law have been published in Scroll, Indian Express, and The Hindu. Her extended family lives in Madras/Chennai, and so she considers this her second home.
Malavika Nataraj 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, UK. She became a freelance writer in 2007 and in 2008, she won an award at the Wimbledon Book Fest (UK) 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.
Mani Rao is a poet, translator and scholar. She has nine books of poetry including New & Selected Poems; two books in translation Bhagavad Gita as a poem, and Kalidasa for the 21st Century Reader. Her latest book Living Mantra: Mantra, Deity and Visionary Experience Today (2019) is an anthropology of mantra-experience among Hindu-tantric practitioners in Andhra-Telangana. Mani’s poems and essays are, or are forthcoming in, journals including Wasafiri, Meanjin, Washington Square, Fulcrum, West CoastLine, Interim and Poetry Magazine, and in anthologies including WW Norton’s Language for a New Century, Penguin’s 60 Indian Poets, and the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. She has held residencies at Omi Ledig House (2018), Iowa IWP (2005 and 2009) and was the 2006 University of Iowa International Programs writer-in-residence. Mani has an MFA in Creative Writing from UNLV, and a PhD in Religious Studies from Duke University.
Manisha Koirala is one of India’s leading film actors. Born into the prominent Koirala family in Nepal, Manisha made her Bollywood debut with Saudagar in 1991, before going on to establish herself with films such as 1942: A Love Story, Akele Hum Akele Tum, Bombay, Khamoshi: The Musical, Dil Se, Mann, Lajja and Company. She took a break from acting in 2012 to return five years later with the coming-of-age drama Dear Maya, Netflix’s Lust Stories and Sanju. She was appointed the Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund in 1999 and 2015 and was involved in the relief works after the Nepal earthquake 2015. She promotes causes such as women’s rights, prevention of violence against women, prevention of human trafficking and cancer awareness. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2012 and has been cancer-free since 2013.
Manjula Padmanabhan is an author, playwright and cartoonist. Her books include Getting There, a travel memoir and Harvest, winner of the 1997 Onassis Award for theatre. Escape, a science-fiction novel set in a woman-less future, was published in 2008 and its sequel, The Island of Lost Girls, is due in 2015.
Manu S Pillai is the author of the award-winning The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore (2015), and Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji (2018). Formerly Chief of Staff to Dr Shashi Tharoor MP, he has in the past worked at the House of Lords in Britain, and with the BBC on their Incarnations history series. Written over six years and researched in three continents, Manu’s first book, The Ivory Throne won the 2017 Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. Manu is also text contributor to Serena Chopra’s Bhutan Echoes (2016) and writes a weekly column for Mint Lounge. His other writings have appeared in The Hindu, Open Magazine, The Times of India, Hindustan Times, and other publications.
Manwara Begum is currently the Vice President of Safai Sena, one of the largest organisations of, by and for waste pickers in India. She has an experience of more than 20 years in working with waste in various capacities. She is a vocal advocate of rights for waste workers, especially female waste workers and their health. She is currently working as a sanitation worker at the Netaji Nagar Post Office, New Delhi.
Meghna Gulzar began her professional career in 1989 as a freelance writer for The Times of India and other publications. Her poems have also been published in anthologies of the Poetry Society of India. A graduate in Sociology from St Xaviers’ College, Mumbai, Meghna worked with noted filmmaker Saeed Akhtar Mirza as an assistant director on the National Award-winning film Naseem; and went on to do a short course in filmmaking from the Tisch School of Arts, New York University, New York. She assisted her father – poet, writer & director Gulzar - on his films Maachis and Hu Tu Tu. Along with scripting her own films, Meghna has made documentaries for Doordarshan on contemporary issues such as domestic help in Mumbai and the burgeoning of private security agencies in Mumbai and directed music videos for several music albums, corporate ad films and also anchored several TV shows including The Amul India Show. Her first feature film, Filhaal… (2002) was about surrogate motherhood. Meghna directed A Pocketful of Poems, a short film on the celluloid and literary works of Gulzar, for the Sahitya Akademi. Her second feature film Just Married (2007) explored the fragile relationship between two people in an arranged marriage. Meghna’s short film Pooranmaashi was among the bouquet of films in Dus Kahaaniyaan (2007). In 2010, Meghna conceived and directed Closer, a documentary on Pervasive Developmental Disorders for the Special Child Trust. Heads & Tales, Meghna’s English translation of the screenplays of Aandhi and Hu Tu Tu, was published in 2014. Talvar, Meghna’s feature film based on the Noida Double-Murder case of 2008, released on October 2, 2015, to rave reviews and tremendous audience appreciation. Meghna’s last feature film Raazi — based on the true story of a young girl, who is married into a Pakistani military family and sent to Pakistan as a spy for India, in 1971 — released on May 11, 2018. Because He Is..., her biography on her father first published in 2004, was released as a new updated edition in September 2018. Meghna is currently working on her next film, based on Acid Violence and explores the story of survivor Laxmi Agarwal. A film on the life of Field Marshal Sam H F J Manekshaw MC is also in the pipeline.
Mukund Padmanabhan was the editor of The Hindu between 2016 and 2019
N Ezhilan (Dr), now a consultant physician in Kauvery Hospital and Aswini Soundara Hospital, Chennai, hails from a family of freedom fighters and completed his MBBS and MD degrees from Madras Medical College. He won the international B Braun Medical Scholar award in 2007 and the gold medal for medicine in 2007. During his years in college, he led agitations for students’ rights and to ensure the basic demands were met. He was instrumental in establishing the Poison Control Centre in the Government General Hospital in Chennai, which is now recognised by the World Health organisation. He has been running a clinic for the poor and the needy from 2004. He founded Youth Org to cultivate a scientific temper, humanism and social reform ideas among the youth. He travelled across Tamil Nadu to demonstrate and hold public meetings to protest against the genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka.
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).
N. Ravi is the Chairman of Kasturi & Sons Ltd, the holding company of The Hindu Group, and was earlier the Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu. He was Chairman of the Board of Press Trust of India, and the President of the Editors’ Guild of India. He is the Chairman of the India Chapter of the International Press Institute, and has been a member of the Executive Board of the International Press Institute, Vienna. Mr Ravi is presently Chairman of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Chennai Kendra. He was a member of the National Integration Council, Government of India, and from 2006 to 2008 of the National Security Advisory Board. He has a Master’s degree in Economics, and a degree in Law, and has won several academic awards including a gold medal in Constitutional and International Law. He was a Fellow at the Harvard Law School in 2000, and Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University in 2004. In 2013, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University.
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.
Nanjil Nadan is the pen name of G Subramaniam. He has to his credit several collections of short stories, essays and poetry and novels. His short stories and poems have also appeared in anthologies. He writes about the struggles of the youth, social injustice and paradoxes and cultural degeneration. His first novel Thalai Keezh Vigidhangal was acclaimed for its vibrant and powerful use of the regional language and cultural nuances. This was later made into a film, Solla Marantha Kathai. Apart from literature, his interests include classical music, folk arts and films. He has participated in many seminars and presented papers on modern literature. His works have been translated to English, Malayalam, and French and are also part of the curriculum in several educational institutions. His awards include the Sahitya Akademi Award for Soodiya Poo Soodarka in 2010, the Government of Tamil Nadu’s literary award for best novel (for Sathuranga Kudhirai); the Kasthuri Seenivasan Trust Award, the Thirupur Tamil Sangam Award, the Kannadasan Award and the Lily Devasigamani Award.
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.
Nazia Erum is the author of the critically acclaimed and hard-hitting book, Mothering a Muslim, which opened prime-time discussions on television and front-page headlines in newspapers. Previously she has handled communications for the Global Fund in India and lead projects for development organisations including the UNDP. Presently she writes on the cross sections of gender, inter-faith and politics.
Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry has a Master’s degree in the History of Arts as well as a diploma from the National School of Drama. In 1979, she moved to Bhopal and was attached to The Rang Mandal, a theatre repertory attached to the Multi-arts Complex, Bharat Bhavan. In 1984, she moved to Chandigarh where she set up her own theatre company called ‘The Company.’ She has also been teaching in the Department of Indian Theatre, Panjab University and was also the Chairperson. Her well-known plays include Kitchen Katha, The Suit, Yerma, Nagamandala, The Mad Woman of Chaillot, Little Eyolf, Bitter Fruit and Naked Voices. The group has participated in major national and international festivals. She is the recipient of several awards including the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2003, and the Padma Shri (2011). She is now Professor Emeritus at the Panjab University.
Neelum Saran Gour is the author of Grey Pigeon and Other Stories, Speaking of 62, Winter Companions and Other Stories, Virtual Realities, Sikandar Chowk Park and Song Without End and Other Stories. She has published a postcolonial parody of Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and PG Wodehouse, translated her work into Hindustani in Baasath Ki Baatein, written a critical study of Raja Rao entitled Raja Rao’s Metaphysical Trilogy and edited a pictorial volume on the history and culture of her city, Allahabad, called Allahabad Where The Rivers Meet. Her recent work includes Three Rivers and A Tree: The Story Of Allahabad University, Allahabad Aria: Stories About Allahabad, and Invisible Ink. Requiem In Raga Janki, a fictional biography of the famous gramophone singer Janki bai Ilahabadi, is her latest novel. Her work has appeared in several anthologies and journals and she has been an active book reviewer for the TLS, The Indian Review of Books, The Book Review and Biblio. She has also written humour columns for the Allahabad page of the Hindustan Times. Her work has appeared in numerous international and national publications including Desert In Bloom, Growing Up As A Woman Writer, Fear Factor, Only Connect, The Creative Process – Seven Essays, and Indian English And Vernacular Literature, Learning Non-violence. Forthcoming works include essays in a volume on Rudyard Kipling and the Kipling Society, U.K., and on Raja Rao. She works as Professor of English at the University of Allahabad.
Neha Singh is a Mumbai-based children’s author, theatre practitioner and women’s rights activist. She has written four books for children: The Wednesday Bazaar and Bela Misses Her Train, Moongphali and I Need To Pee. She also writes for Pratham’s Storyweaver and for Hindi children’s magazines Pluto, Cycle and Chakmak. Neha is a theatre actor, writer, instructor, director and producer and has worked in over fifteen professional plays in Mumbai. She has produced two plays under her own banner Rahi Theatre — Dohri Zindagi and Jhalkari — and tours the country with her theatre company. She is also an activist and spearheads the Why Loiter? campaign in Mumbai that encourages women to loiter in public spaces to make them safe for women. She blogs about the same on whyloiter.blogspot.com. She was chosen as ‘one of hundred most influential women in the world’ in 2016 by BBC World for her work at Why Loiter?
Nighat Sahiba was born in Kashmir and represents women seeking their voice in a male chauvinistic society. Her canvas highlights the rotten and putrid behind the gloss and glitter that is put on display to soothe the visitors. A teacher by profession and poet by passion, she is the author of Zard Paneki Dair (a collection of Kashmiri poems) for which she was awarded the Sahitya Academy Yuva Puraskar (2017). She has been awarded Akber Jaipuri Memorial Award for her Urdu poetry (2014) and Mallika Sengupta National Award (2018) for her outstanding contribution to literature. Her poems (both in Urdu and Kashmiri) have been widely published in prestigious literary journals.
Nilima Sheikh was born to doctor parents in Delhi. She studied History at Delhi University and then art at Baroda, where she was introduced to the linguistics of varied art-making processes. During the last two decades she has worked on subjects that relate to the northern region of the subcontinent of India and Pakistan, particularly to Kashmir. This has accumulated in a body of work that tries creating visual language to bring together different aspects of the region and its histories to understand some of the complexities therein. This also led to a collaboration with artists and craftspeople from Srinagar on a large mural project Conjoining Lands, for the airport in Mumbai. She has written on art in books, journals or catalogue essays for friends and illustrated books for children. In the 1990s she became part of a women’s collective Vivadi when she painted sets and did theatre design for theatre productions.
Lakshman, Nirmala is a journalist and Director of The Hindu group of publications. She was Joint Editor of The Hindu and has held senior editorial positions at the newspaper for more than three decades. Nirmala founded and edited The Hindu Literary Review, and conceptualized and created Young World, India’s only children’s newspaper supplement. She launched and curated The Hindu’s literary festival, Lit for Life, and initiated the annual Prize for Best Fiction from The Hindu. Nirmala has a PhD in postmodern fiction from Madras University and a master’s degree in English from the United States. She is the author of Degree Coffee By The Yard and editor of an anthology of contemporary Indian journalism, Writing a Nation.
Nisha Rajagopal was initially trained by her musician mother, and later by veterans TR Subramaniam and PS Narayanaswami and retains a strong hold on the classicist tradition, using it as the nourishing base for crafting improvisational and virtuosic skills. She performs all over India and has toured the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Recipient of many national and regional awards (the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar, Isai Peroli and Kalki Krishnamurthy Memorial Award), Nisha was adjudged “Outstanding Lady Vocalist” by the Madras Music Academy and was the first recipient of The Hindu Saregama MS Subbulakshmi Award. Nisha has provided music for dance artist Alarmel Valli’s performance at the prestigious Salzburg Festival, Austria, as also live music for JustUs Repertory’s multi-genre productions like Sarpa Sutra, Yashodhara and Miradasi.
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.
Nayar, Parvathi is a contemporary visual artist based in Chennai – who works with hand-drawn graphite on wood, paint, video and sculpture. Parvathi received her Masters in Fine Art from Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London, on a Chevening scholarship. She has exhibited widely in India and abroad, and her works collected by institutions such as the Singapore Art Museum. Parvathi is also a writer, poet and commentator on aspects of creative disciplines that include film, literature and modern dance. Her upcoming solo in Chennai (Feb2014) is titled The Ambiguity of Landscapes.
Parvathy Thiruvothu is an actor who works predominantly in the Malayalam film industry
ZACHARIA, PAUL is a Malayalam fiction writer and columnist.He is known for taking a non-conformist stance in political commentary and for his humour and the use of unconventional themes in his works of fiction. The author of over forty books, he has received the central and state Sahitya Akademi awards, among others. His works have been translated into several Indian and international languages. He lives in Thiruvananthapuram.
PERUMAL MURUGAN is the author of 11 novels and five collections of short stories, poems and a memoir as well as 10 books of non-fiction. He is the winner of ILF Samanvay Bhasha Samman 2015. In 2018, his books One Part Woman and Poonachi were long-listed for the National Book Awards for Translated Literature in the U.S. and Pyre was shortlisted for the JCB Prize, the Atta Galatta-BLF Award for Translated Literature and longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023. His Seasons of the Palm was shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize. He won the JCB Prize for Literature 2023 for his novel Fire Bird. He worked as the Principal of Anna College, Namakkal, from where he took voluntary retirement.
Pralayan Shanmugasundaram Chandrasekaran, better known as Pralayan, is one of the pioneering theatre personalities who are spearheading the modern theatre movement with the major emphasis towards the open-air theatre performances in Tamil Nadu. As the founder and convener of Chennai Kalai Kuzhu, he has been active in the Tamil Nadu theatre scene from 1984. He has written, facilitated and directed more than 50 open-air plays and 23 proscenium plays including Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince, Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, Habib Tanvir’s Moteram ka Satyagragh, Charandas Chor, Chandrashekhara Kambara’s Mahamayi, Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes. Pralayan’s works and presentations are known for their dynamic engagement with the space and its design and vibrant music. He has also conducted workshops and directed the plays across India and in countries like Norway, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.
PRATIK SINHA is the co-founder of Alt News, an information verification and media watchdog website from India. He worked as a software engineer for 14 years before founding Alt News. He combines various disciplines such as journalism, engineering and activism to design and execute solutions to alleviate the corruption of the information ecosystem in India. His work is in the space of misinformation, disinformation, hate speech and information literacy. Through his work, he hopes to create more critical thought in society.
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 Sahgal is the senior executive editor at NewsX channel, where she anchors two political shows: The Roundtable and Cover Story. Her book, The Contenders, came out in November 2018. This profiles 16 GenNext politicians, capturing a potentially transformative moment in Indian politics, as Rahul Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav, Tejashwi Yadav, the Badal Juniors and Karunanidhi’s heirs take charge; while others like Omar Abdullah and Arvind Kejriwal seek to consolidate. A political journalist for nearly three decades, Priya has worked at Sunday, Outlook and India Today (magazines). She is also a political columnist for The Sunday Guardian. Priya studied at Welhams Girls’ School in Dehra Dun and holds a first class degree in BA (Hons) English from St Stephen’s College along with an MA.
R Cheran (Dr) is a Tamil-Canadian academic, poet, playwright and journalist. He is a professor at the University of Windsor in Canada. He has authored over fifteen books in Tamil, and his work has been translated into twenty languages. Several volumes of his work have been published in English translation. The latest one - reflect the tragedy and pain of mass atrocities and trauma - is In a Time of Burning. Cheran was the recipient of the International Poetry Award from ONV Kurup Foundation in Dubai in 2017. He has performed his poetry at various International Writers’ festivals in the United Kingdom, Singapore, the US, Indonesia, India, Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada, Ramallah, West Bank, Dubai and Mexico. His plays in English language have been produced and performed in Toronto, Canada, and New York, Chicago and New Jersey in the US. Singapore’s modern dance group Chowk has produced and performed a dance play based on his poems titled The Second Sunrise, which was performed at the Singapore International dance festival, and Washington’s Kennedy Centre for the arts.
R Jagannathan is a journalist with over 42 years’ experience in business and general journalism. He has been part of many launch teams, including Business Today, DNA and Firstpost.com and has also helped revamp many business publications as Editor of Financial Express, Indian Management, and BusinessWorld. He started his career with Financial Express as reporter/sub-editor in 1976 in Mumbai. His recent focus has been on digital commentary and journalism, having been associated with Firstpost.com, Moneycontrol,com, business-standard.com, and myiris.com. He was awarded the Shriram Sanlam Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. He is now Editorial Director of Swarajya magazine, a project associated with Rajaji, but which went defunct after his passing away.
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.
Radha Chakravarty is a writer, critic and translator. She has co-edited The Essential Tagore, nominated Book of the Year 2011 by Martha Nussbaum, and edited Shades of Difference: Selected Writings of Rabindranath Tagore (2015). She is the author of Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers (2008) and Novelist Tagore: Gender and Modernity in Selected Texts (2013). Her translations of Tagore include Gora, Chokher Bali, Boyhood Days, Farewell Song: Shesher Kabita and The Land of Cards: Stories, Poems and Plays for Children. Other works in translation are Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Kapalkundala, In the Name of the Mother by Mahasweta Devi, Vermillion Clouds: Stories by Bengali Women, and Crossings: Stories from Bangladesh and India. She has edited Bodymaps: Stories by South Asian Women and co-edited Writing Feminism: South Asian Voices and Writing Freedom: South Asian Voices. Her poems have appeared in Journal of the Poetry Society of India, The Fib Review, The Skinny Poetry Journal and Indian Poetry Through the Passage of Time. She is currently translating the memoirs of Mahasweta Devi. She was nominated for the Crossword Translation Award, 2004. She is Professor of Comparative Literature & Translation Studies and Dean, School of Letters, at Ambedkar University Delhi.
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.
Rahul Roy graduated from the Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi in 1987 with a degree in film making. His films have travelled across the globe and won prestigious international awards. His work stands at the cross section of the city, labour and men’s lives. Besides directing his own films, Roy has produced several documentaries and two fiction films in the South Asian region. His graphic book on masculinities titled A Little Book on Men was published by Yoda Press. And he has recently co-edited (with Dr. Deepak Mehta) a volume titled Violence and The Quest For Justice In South Asia for a SAGE/Yoda imprint.
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.
Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer who is currently Distinguished University Professor at Krea University. He has previously taught at Stanford University, the Indian Institute of Science, and the London School of Economics. His books include The Unquiet Woods, a pioneering environmental history; A Corner of a Foreign Field, an award-winning social history of cricket; and India after Gandhi, a widely acclaimed history of India. He is also the author of a two-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi (Gandhi Before India, and Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World), each of which was chosen as a book of the year by the New York Times. His most recent book is Rebels against the Raj. His books and essays have been translated into more than 20 languages. Guha’s awards include the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History, the Howard Milton Prize of the British Society for Sports History, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to Asian studies. He is the recipient of an honorary doctorate in the humanities from Yale University
Ramya Kannan has over 25 years in journalism, anachronistically in these times, all of them at The Hindu. She is the newspaper’s Tamil Nadu bureau chief, but does not allow the job to be restrictive — continuing to be passionate about health and development issues, which she has reported on steadily through quarter of a century. If the last couple of years have turned the world on its head, then the endeavour has been to make sense of things within this new paradigm. Besides that, she is trigger happy, shooting pictures; has a green thumb, and is always trying to keep up with her effervescent 11-year-old daughter, and only sometimes succeeding.
Ravi Agarwal lives and works in New Delhi. With an inter-disciplinary practice as an artist, environmental activist, writer and curator, his work explores contemporary questions around ideas of nature, society, urban space and capital, and has been shown widely including at the Kochi Biennale (2016), the Sharjah Biennale (2013), Indian Highway (2009), Documenta XI (2002) etc. He co-curated the Yamuna-Elbe project, the first Indo-German twin city (Hamburg-Delhi) public art and ecology project in 2011. His practice has been written about in publications such as the Art Ecology Now (2014), Cities and Photography (2013), and Third Text (2014), and his work has been exhibited in several museums and private collections. Ravi is also the founder of the Indian environmental NGO Toxics Link and has pioneered work in waste and chemicals in India. He has led campaigns for Delhi’s ridge forest and the river Yamuna and co-edited several journal issues and books. He was awarded the UN Special Recognition Award for Chemical Safety (2008) and the Ashoka Fellowship (1997). His training was in communication engineering and business management.
Ravi Shankar Etteth is a Delhi-based journalist, political cartoonist, graphic designer and author who has edited magazines and newspapers and worked in television. He has been the editorial cartoonist of The Indian Express, Creative Director of the Observer Group, an editor with India Today, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Voice of India and Millionaire and the Editor of The Sunday Standard. In 1996, Etteth published his first book of short stories The Scream of the Dragonflies. Subsequently, he published five more titles: The Brahmin (2018), The Book of Shiva (2016), The Gold of Their Regrets (2009), The Village of Widows (2004) and The Tiger By The River. (2002). He is now a columnist and Consulting Editor with The New Indian Express.
Reetika Khera is an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
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.
Diwekar, Rujuta works out of Mumbai, practices yoga in Rishikesh, ideates in Uttarkashi and treks in rest of the Indian Himalaya. Winner of the ‘Nutrition Award’ from Asian Institute of Gastroenterology, she is amongst the most qualified and sought after practitioners in India today and the only nutritionist to have associate membershp from Sports Dietitians, Australia. Rujuta helps people from all walks of life, from businessmen to homemakers, students, celebrities and sportsmen. Her most famous clients include Anil Ambani, Kareena Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan. Her two books have sold more than 5 lakh copies and have been translated in more than 5 languages. Her film “Indian food wisdom & the art of eating right” is out on DVD and already on the best‑seller charts. Her 3rd book, ‘Donʹt lose out, work out!’ will be out this month.
S Karthigaichelvan, currently the Managing Editor of Puthiya Thalaimurai TV, has 22 years of experience in print, visual and digital news media. He has been consistently reporting on Sri Lankan Tamil issues from 2000 and interviewed former Sri Lankan President Sirisena, Northern Province CM Wigneshwaran and other senior leaders. He worked with former President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam to write a book in Tamil. Karthigaichelvan now anchors a prime-time show Nerpada Pesu in Puthiya Thalaimurai TV besides anchoring Agni Paritchai (a one-on-one Interview with senior political leaders) and Vatta Mesai Vivatham. He has interviewed many senior leaders including former Tamil Nadu Chief Ministers M Karunanidhi and J Jayalalithaa. He was awarded by Vikatan group for best anchor and mentioned him as ‘Anbin Neriyaalar’. As editorial head of Puthiya Thalaimurai TV, he has taken many initiatives like covering the farmer’s crisis for one whole day and on-field coverage during the Chennai floods, Jallikattu protests, farmers’ deaths in the state, Ochki and Gaja cyclones.
S Maunaguru (Prof) is a theatre practitioner and scholar from Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, best known as a proponent and innovator of the Koothu form of traditional Tamil theatre. He currently leads a multi-generational group of performers who experiment with koothu at the Batticaloa Theatre Lab. Over the last 50 years he has made significant contributions to performance as well as in research in the field of theatre. He has written more than 25 books and 15 plays in Tamil. Four of his works have received State Sahitya Mandala awards in Sri Lanka. In 1963, he wrote the ground-breaking play Ravanesan (an interpretation of the Ramayana epic with a focus on Ravana as the main protagonist) and has subsequently often reworked the play to reflect contemporary issues in Sri Lanka. He taught at the University of Jaffna and the Eastern University of Sri Lanka, where he produced and directed many plays. His work has been performed and screened internationally, including at Johns Hopkins University, the US and the National University of Singapore. His most recent production is Kandava Thahanam or Burning the Forest performed in koothu style at an international Dance Theatre festival. In 2015, he was awarded the Desa Nethru title by Sri Lanka’s Culture Ministry.
S Peter Alphonse is a former Member of Parliament and of the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly. He has chaired many committees in the latter and, in 2008, led the Indian delegation of State Legislative Assemblies to the National Conference of State Assemblies in the US. He entered politics as a student in 1969 and was the convenor of the Chennai City chapter of the National Students Union of India in 1971-72. He has been a spokesperson and member of the All India Congress Committee since 2009. Among the various posts he has held were Director, Pandyan Grama Bank; Member, Coir Board, Government of Inda and Member, All India Council for Technical Education.
Samir Parikh (Dr) is a Consultant Psychiatrist with Fortis Healthcare and Director of the Fortis National Mental Health Programme. With an expressive communicative style and an in-depth knowledge of mental health in the Indian culture, Dr. Parikh has been a speaker at various national and international forums on mental health issues. As a leading academic expert in the field of Mental Health, Dr Parikh takes academic training programmes and courses for doctors, psychologists, and other allied specialties in mental health. With a strong emphasis on preventive mental health and skill building, Dr. Parikh has authored three books. Two are DIY Life Skills workbooks for school children and Let Him Not Sink: First Steps to Mental Health is a Psychological First Aid Manual for adults working with children.
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 Kak is an independent documentary filmmaker and writer whose recent work includes the films Red Ant Dream (2013) about the persistence of the revolutionary ideal in India, Jashn-e-Azadi (How we celebrate freedom, 2007) about the idea of freedom in Kashmir, and Words on Water (2002) about the struggle against the Narmada dams. His most recent work is the critically acclaimed photobook, Witness – Kashmir 1986-2016, 9 Photographers, which he curated, edited and published independently. He is the editor of the anthology Until My Freedom Has Come – The New Intifada in Kashmir. A self-taught filmmaker, he writes occasional political commentary, and reviews books that he is passionately engaged by. He has been active with the documentary cinema movement in India.
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.
Sharanya Manivannan is the author of five books, including the new novel The Queen of Jasmine Country and the short story collection The High Priestess Never Marries, which won the 2015-2016 South Asia Laadli Media and Advertising Award for Gender Sensitivity (Best Book – Fiction). She is also the author of two books of poetry, Witchcraft and The Altar of the Only World, and a children’s picture book, The Ammuchi Puchi.
Sheela Nambiar (Dr) was born and brought up in Ooty, Nilgiris and went on to do her Medicine in Madras Medical College, Chennai. She completed her MD in Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 1994 at the Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, as a gold medalist. She currently practises out of her own hospital, Parvathy Medical Centre in Ooty. Passionate about fitness on a personal level, she includes fitness, food and lifestyle modification for patients to prevent, manage and even reverse lifestyle-related diseases. In addition to Obstetrics & Gynecology, Dr. Nambiar practices Lifestyle Medicine and is a fitness consultant who uses Positive Psychology in her practice to treat both men and women holistically to improve quality of life. She is the author of three books: Get Size Wise, Gain To Lose and Fit After 40, which was published in August 2018. Her subject expertise on fitness, food and lifestyle takes her to conferences (both national and international), social organisations, schools, colleges and corporates. She offers fitness and lifestyle consultancy through her hospital in Ooty, the TFL Fitness Studio and Westminister Healthcare in Chennai and through online consultations.
Shekhar Sen inherited his love for music, story, melody, rhythm and harmony from his parents, Dr Arunkumar and Dr Anita Sen, well-known classical singers and musicologists. Arriving in Mumbai in 1979, Shekhar began his stage career with innovative musicals drawn from his deep knowledge of Hindi literature. He has sung and composed music for many TV serials and films, besides participating in concerts in India and abroad and has 227 albums to his credit. In 1998 Shekhar reinvented himself as a playwright who also sang, composed, directed and acted by performing mono-act musicals on immortal saint-poets Kabeer, Tulsidas and Soordas. He later added Vivekananda and the Common Man to his repertoire. He was conferred the Padma Shri in 2015 and has been appointed as Chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademi.
Shiv Visvanathan is Professor, Jindal Global Law School and Director, Centre for the Study of Knowledge Systems, O.P. Jindal Global University.
Shobha Vishwanath is the publishing director of Karadi Tales Company. She has authored over twenty-five books for children, including Little Vinayak that was listed in the 2013 IBBY Catalog of Outstanding Books for Young People with Disabilities. She collects picture books and considers herself an accidental writer.
Shonali Muthalaly is an Associate Editor at The Hindu, running the MetroPlus and Weekend supplements. A Chevening scholar, she writes and reports on the intersection between food and culture, and oversees The Hindu’s food vertical, building a product that engages with both diners and professionals in the culinary space. She also writes on theatre, art and travel.
Shweta Bachchan Nanda is a columnist for DNA and Vogue. A well-known personality, she is the daughter of actors Jaya and Amitabh Bachchan. Shweta is married to Nikhil Nanda and is the mother of two children. She has her own clothing label, MxS, which launched in 2018. She lives in New Delhi. This is her first novel.
SR Sundaram (aka Kannan Sundaram) is the Managing Director and Publisher of Kalachuvadu Publication Pvt Ltd. He is also the Editor and Publisher of Kalachuvadu, a monthly journal for culture and politics. He co-organised ‘Tamil Ini 2000′, the international Tamil conference on 20th century Tamil writing. He has been on the International Visitor Program to the U.S (2002) and the Frankfurt Book Fair fellowship program (2007). He was invited to the Visiting International Publisher program in Sydney in 2017. Kalachuvadu first established itself as a premier little magazine and has now expanded its scope beyond the reaches of a literary journal to function as a broad forum for politics and culture. Kannan’s mission is to get the best of Tamil literature translated into other Indian and world languages and vice versa. He has published five books comprising critical articles on Tamil media and politics. His sixth collection will be published this year.
Sridhar Krishnaswami (Dr) has been a Journalist for 25 years. For 18 years he was a Foreign Correspondent — ten years with The Hindu in Washington D.C. (1995-2005) ; three years with The Press Trust of India (2005-2008) in Washington D.C.; and for four years in Singapore (1991-1995) in charge of South East Asia and the Asia Pacific with The Hindu. Prior to his overseas assignments with The Hindu, he was the newspaper’s Editorial Writer. Currently Dr. Krishnaswami is a Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Science and Humanities, SRM Institute of Science and Technology and Professor in the Dept. of Journalism and Mass Communication.
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.
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.
Suhrith Parthasarathy practises at the Madras High Court in Chennai, India. He holds a degree in law from the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata, and in journalism from Columbia University, New York. He has contributed chapters to many books, including Dignity in the Legal and Political Philosophy of Ronald Dworkin, and Appointment of Judges to the Supreme Court of India: Transparency, Accountability, and Independence, (OUP). Suhrith is a regular contributor to the op-ed pages of The Hindu. His writing has also appeared, among other places, in Caravan magazine, Open magazine, The Indian Express, The Economic and Political Weekly, and on the websites of The New Yorker, The New York Times and ESPN Cricinfo. Suhrith’s writings are collated at http://suhrith.net.
Suki Kim is a South Korea-born American investigative journalist, novelist, and the only writer ever to have lived undercover in North Korea for immersive journalism. She is the author of the NY Times best-seller Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korean Elite, which is a literary investigative documentation of North Korea’s most important recent history. Her first novel, The Interpreter, won a PEN Open Book Award and was a finalist for a PEN Hemingway Prize, and her articles and essays regularly appear in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and The New Republic, where she is a contributing editor. She has been featured around the world, including on CNN’s Christian Amanpour and Fareed Zakaria Show, BBC Radio 4, BBC Breakfast Show, and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, and her TED Talk has drawn millions of viewers online. She is a 2019 New America fellow and her essay on fear appears in Best American Essays 2018.
Sumana Roy’s first book, How I Became a Tree, a work of non-fiction, was published in India in February 2017. Her first novel, Missing, was published in April 2018. Her poems and essays have appeared in Granta, Guernica, LARB, Drunken Boat, the Prairie Schooner, Berfrois, The Common, and other journals. She lives in Siliguri in India.
Sunandha Raghunathan, an actor, writer and director with over 13 years’ experience in Chennai’s English theatre, is one of the founders of Guduguduppukkari. She has worked with groups like Theatre Nisha, JustUs Repertory, Stagefright Productions and Crea-Shakthi and has directed several plays for schools and the professional stage. Sunandha has written Mundhirikkotte, developed as part of The Royal Court’s International Writing Programme, which premiered at Prithvi Theatre as part of the Writers Bloc festival and was also featured in The Hindu Metroplus Theatre Fest. She has also written Notes to a Young Actor (Theatre Nisha), Bad Hindu (for Guduguduppukkari, which she also directed and performed in) and several one-act plays, which won awards for best writing in the Short + Sweet Festival. Sunandha wrote the screenplay for the critically acclaimed 2016 film Irudhi Suttru. She is a Charles Wallace scholar who recently graduated with a Master’s in Text and Performance from RADA and Birkbeck College and is also trained in Kalaripayattu and Bharatanatyam.
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.
Susan Hawthorne (Dr) is a poet, novelist, non-fiction writer and co-founder of Spinifex Press. Since 2012 she has been Adjunct Professor in the College of Arts, Society, and Education, James Cook University, Townsville. Susan has degrees in Philosophy, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit and a PhD in Political Science. She has had three international literature residencies in India (2009), Italy (2013), and Turkey (2018). In 2009 Susan had an Asialink Literature Residency in Chennai at the University of Madras. During this time, she wrote the poetry collection, Cow (2011). She was involved in teaching creative writing classes at the university and other educational institutions through Eugenie Pinto and others. Susan met Mangai Arasu by serendipity and became involved in the choreography of the play, Sanchari, for Chennai and Bangalore performances (when she was an aerialist in a circus). She participated in a reading for Prajnya and gave many talks and conference presentations. Since then she has published a chapbook, Valence (2011); a verse novel, Limen (2013); a poetry collection Lupa and Lamb (2014); a non-fiction book Bibliodiversity: A Manifesto for Independent Publishing (2014); and a most recently, a novel Dark Matters (2017). She has visited India often including as an Australia Council India Exploratory publishing delegate in 2016. She has been studying Sanskrit for a decade. With her publishing hat on, Susan has worked with many publishers including Zubaan, Women Unlimited, Rupa, Stree among others.
Sushama Deshpande is a well-known theatre and film actor. She has been in theatre for over 40 years as a writer, director and actor. She enjoys presenting strong women in theatre like Savitribai Phule, the tamasha folk artists of Maharashtra, women saints of Maharashtra through their poetry, and Dalit writer Urmila Pawar’s autobiography. She studied techniques of the Theatre of the Oppressed with the late August Boal and works with rural women through those techniques. She also works with theatre artistes and works with communities.
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.
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.
THOL THIRUMAVALAVAN is a Dalit activist and the current president of the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi. His political platform centres on ending the caste-based oppression of the Dalits. He has degrees in Chemistry, Criminology and law. He worked in the government’s Forensic Department as a scientific assistant and resigned in 1999 to contest the elections. His books in Tamil include Aththumeeru, Tamizhargal Hindukkala?, Eelam Enral Puligal, Puligal Enral Eelam, Hindutuvathai Veraruppom, and Saadhiya Sandharpavaadha Aniyai Veezhtuvom. Two of his books — Talisman: Extreme Emotions of Dalit Liberation (political essays published in India Today’s Tamil edition) and Uproot Hindutva: The Fiery Voice of the Liberation Panthers (a collection of his speeches) — have been published in English by Stree-Samya Books, Kolkata.
Ulrike Almut Sandig grew up in a parsonage in Nauwalde and now lives with her family in Berlin. Her first literary texts were published in the form of posters on traffic lights, construction sites and electric boxes in Leipzig and other cities. After completing her Masters in Religious Studies and Modern Indology in Leipzig, she subsequently graduated from the German Creative Writing Program Leipzig. Ulrike Almut Sandig has published two prose books, three pop music albums, radio pieces as well as four volumes of poetry. For her audiobooks, radio plays and speaking concerts, Ulrike Almut Sandig works closely with filmmakers, composers, musicians and sound artists. Her poems have been widely anthologised and received, among other awards, the renowned Leonce-and-Lena Prize. In 2018, she received the Wilhelm Lehmann Prize and Karen Leeder’s English translations of her poetry books Thick of it and Grimm were published.
Urmila Pawar was born in a small village of Ratnagiri as the youngest child in a Dalit family. Early in life, she learned the meaning of her subordination as a woman and as a dalit . The lessons she learned about the need for self-confidence and courage to overcome these forms of discrimination stood her in good stead in her attempts to break barriers. She went on to do her Master’s degree From Mumbai University. A prolific writer, she has published 10 books including three short story collections. Selected stories were translated in English as Mother Wit by Prof Veena Deo of Hamline University, the US. She has won many prizes for her sensitive exploration of the lives of Dalit women in India. Her autobiography Aydaan continues to touch the hearts of all lovers of Marathi literature. She is a member of many organisations that are working for women’s welfare. She has attended many literary and social programmes in Nepal, Mauritius, Sweden England, Australia and Switzerland
Urvashi Butalia is an Indian feminist and historian. She is the Director and Co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house. Her writing has appeared in several newspapers including the Guardian, The Statesman, The Times of India, The Hindu and several magazines such as Outlook, New Internationalist and India Today. She was also conferred the Padma Shri award for her contribution to Indian literature in 2011. She is known for her book, The Other Side of Silence which is the product of more than 70 interviews Butalia conducted with survivors of the Partition.
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
Venki Ramakrishnan (Dr) grew up in India before moving to the US in 1971 at the age of 19. Following a PhD in physics, he studied biology for two years before he began his studies on the ribosome, the large molecular complex in all cells that translates genetic information into proteins. He moved in 1999 to Cambridge, England. For his role on the atomic structure of the ribosome and its complex with antibiotics, he shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry. He is also the current president of the Royal Society and the author of Gene Machine, a candid memoir that describes both the quest for the ribosome structure and the human side of science.
VIJAY NAGASWAMI (DR) is a Chennai-based psychiatrist, who currently practises Individual & Couple Psychotherapy. He has delivered guest lectures on various aspects and nuances of Marriage, Psychotherapy and Couple Therapy in India. He is the author of six self-help books. The three books in his New Indian Marriage Series — The 24x7 Marriage, The Fifty-50 Marriage, and 3’s A Crowd: Understanding and Surviving Marital Infidelity — have all been bestsellers. His sixth book, To D or Not to D: Working Towards an Amicable Divorce, was launched earlier this year. He’s a columnist and divides his time between his clinical practice, writing, and delivering lectures and talks on various aspects of mental health.
Vinodhini Vaidhyanathan has triple post-graduate degrees in Human Resources management, psychology and yoga therapy and trained at Koothuppattarai, as a full-time actor, where she worked with theatre personalities from all over India, and from countries such as Israel, UK, Spain, Mexico and France. She has worked as an actor for stage and film, a director (stage) and playwright, acting in over 20 plays over 250 shows. She continues to work with Tamil theatre groups in Chennai and with Clowns without Borders from France. Grand Rehearsal, a Tamil play written and directed by her, was the first Tamil play invited to be performed at The Hindu Theatre Fest in 2015. Since this was well received, she was again commissioned to write and direct another Tamil play the next year. Aayirathiyoru Iravugal, along with a double bill called Nagercoil Expressum Nadaga Companyum, won critical acclaim and appreciation for the humor and subversive perspective, first at The Hindu Theatre Fest and later on tours. She has acted in over 25 feature films, with filmmakers such as Mani Ratnam, National Award-winners Balu Mahendra, among others. She has worked as a part-time theatre faculty at Balu Mahendra’s Cinema Pattarai and conducted workshops for children from all walks of life. She won the Vikatan Award for Best Female Actor in a Comic role 2016, for the film Aandavan Kattalai. Her articles, stories and opinion pieces have been published in The News Minute, The Madras Mag, Anthi Mazhai , a literary magazine, The Hindu Tamil and silverscreen.in among others.
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.
VV Ramani is an alumnus of the Government college of Arts and Crafts, Madras, has over four decades of experience in the field of art and design exploring various dimensions and media - painting, murals, collages , textile and costume designing, set designing , teaching and writing on visual and performing arts. A versatile artist with a holistic approach the art of collage has been his chosen medium of expression for over two decades. His collages reflect a distinct vocabulary and personal visual expression that sets his work apart. His work Navarasa, inspired by music and dance, won him the State-level Ovia Nun Kalai Kuzhu Award in 1997. He also received the Kalai Nanmani award from the Department of Art and Culture, Government of Tamil Nadu in 2015. His works are in public and private collections in India and abroad
VVS Laxman is a former Indian cricketer and now a cricket commentator and mentor to the IPL team Sunrisers Hyderabad. He received the Arjuna Award in 2002, the Padma Shri in 2011 and was named one of Wisden’s five Cricketers of the Year in 2002. He lives in Hyderabad with his family
Yasser Usman is an award-winning TV journalist and the author of three bestselling biographies - Rajesh Khanna: The Untold Story of India’s First Superstar, Rekha: The Untold Story and Sanjay Dutt: The Crazy Untold Story of Bollywood’s Bad Boy. He has been a recipient of the prestigious Ramnath Goenka Award for excellence in journalism, among many others.
Yohan Chacko (Dr) is a dentist and professor by profession and has honed his thespian skills over many years of being on stage. He started acting in Chennai in 2009 and since, has acted in 35 productions with various directors. Currently, he serves on the committee of The Madras Players (India’s oldest Amateur Theatre Company). He is also a versatile musician with YouTube hits running to millions of views. Chacko’s notable performances have been in Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq and as Jean Valjean from Les Miserables. In May 2018, he donned his directorial hat with Peter Pan that had a cast and crew of 150 students from The Lawrence School, Lovedale. In June 2018, he directed The Man from Earth for The Madras Players.
Ziya Us Salam is a veteran journalist and widely published author. His latest book Being Muslim in Hindu India is a bestseller. His upcoming book is The Lion of Naushera. Based in New Delhi, he works with The Hindu as an Associate Editor.
