Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and shared the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry for a decade, and in 2022 Burning Questions, a collection of essays, was a Sunday Times bestseller.
Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
Prof Yuval Noah Harari has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford and now lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in World History. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind has become an international phenomenon attracting a legion of fans from Bill Gates and Barack Obama to Chris Evans and Jarvis Cocker, and is published in sixty languages worldwide. It was a Sunday Times Number One bestseller and was in the Top Ten for over nine months in paperback. His follow-up to Sapiens, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow was also a Top Ten Bestseller and was described by the Guardian as ‘even more readable, even more important, than his excellent Sapiens’. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, was a Number One Bestseller and was described by Bill Gates as ‘fascinating’ and ‘crucial’. Harari worked closely with renowned comics illustrator Daniel Casanave and co-writer David Vandermeulen to create his latest book, an adaptation of his first bestseller, Sapiens Graphic Novel: Volume 1.
Amor Towles is the author of New York Times bestsellers Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow. The two novels have collectively sold more than 4 million copies and have been translated into more than thirty languages. Towles lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.
Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. She attended Huntington College and studied law at the University of Alabama. She is the author of the acclaimed novels To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and numerous other literary awards and honours. She died on 19 February 2016.
Haruki Murakami’s first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won the Gunzou Literature Prize in 1979. He is the author of many novels including Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Sputnik Sweetheart and Kafka on the Shore. He has written three short story collections: The Elephant Vanishes, After the Quake, and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. He has received numerous international literary honors, including the Jerusalem Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the World Fantasy Award, and the Noma Literary Prize, as well a feature in TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2015. Murakami’s work has been translated into more than fifty languages.
Madhav Gadgil was born in 1942 amid the hills of Western Ghats and, fascinated by its rich natural and cultural heritage, decided, while still a high school student, to become a field ecologist-cum-anthropologist. He was educated in Pune, Mumbai and Harvard University, where he did a doctoral thesis in mathematical ecology and won the IBM Computer Center Fellowship.
For thirty-one years he was on the faculty of Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, where he established the Centre for Ecological Sciences and engaged in basic as well as applied research in collaboration with tribals, farmers, herders and fisherfolk. He was involved in drafting India’s Biological Diversity Act and has chaired the Science and Technology Advisory Panel of Global Environment Facility and the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel.
R. Vaidyanathan is a retired professor of finance from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.
A graduate of Loyola College, Chennai, and with a master’s from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, he obtained his doctorate from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta where he also taught for four years.
Prof. Vaidyanathan is a two-time Fulbright scholar and also a fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). He was visiting faculty at various universities in the US and UK. In the past, he has been selected by Business Today as one of the ten best professors at all IIMs. He has had the rare privilege of being in the various committees of regulators such as SEBI, RBI, IRDA and PFRDA. He is a consultant to many organizations and is on the board of many corporates. He is a fellow of Salzburg Seminar.
Prof. Vaidyanathan was conferred the Lifetime Contribution Award by the Asia Pacific Risk and Insurance Association (APRIA) and Kybo Life in 2019. His 2013 book, India Uninc: Role of Non-corporate sectors in India, which focuses on Indian and Asian value systems, was well received by planners and policymakers. His 2019 book, Caste as Social Capital, has been acclaimed by experts.
VALMIKI FALEIRO, one of Goa’s home-grown prolific writers, was a staff reporter with the West Coast Times. He also covered Goa for national publications like the Current Weekly, the Free Press Journal group of publications and the Indian Express. As a freelancer before that, he contributed articles and features to various journals, including the Navhind Times, Goa Today, Sun Weekly, Newstrek, Detective Digest, Mirror and Newsmag. Faleiro was among the dozen-odd Indians selected for the ‘Workshop for Asian Writers’ held in March 1977 at the India International Centre, New Delhi.
Faleiro was briefly (1985-87), the municipal president of Margao. On picking up the pen once again, after a gap of two decades, he wrote a couple of chapters for a book on Goa’s print media (In Black and White: Insiders’ Stories about the Press in Goa) and, for four years (2005-09), wrote a regular Sunday column, All ‘n’ Sundry, in a local daily newspaper. Patriotism in Action: Goans in India’s Defence Services was his first book, followed by Soaring Spirit: 450 Years of Margao’s Espírito Santo Church 1565-2015.
Deepa Sethi is the dean, programmes and international relations, and professor, business communication, in the area of humanities and liberal arts in management at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, India. With more than fifteen years of teaching and research experience, she specializes in business communication, soft skills, social media communication, advanced corporate communication and cross-cultural communication, among other areas. She has been published in and has guest-edited major academic journals. Experiential and activity-based teaching have been her forte, and she is known for her style of teaching, which has practical implications in addition to theoretical underpinnings. Her training programmes on topics such as managerial effectiveness lab, communication effectiveness lab and soft skills for interpersonal effectiveness for working executives are highly acclaimed. Her faculty development programme, titled ‘Innovative Approaches in Management Teaching’, is much sought after.
William H.J. Hubbard is a lawyer, economist and expert in the empirical study of courts. He is a professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School, editor of the Journal of Legal Studies, research fellow at the American Bar Foundation and has served as director and president of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies. He is the author of Civil Procedure: An Integrated Approach and a number of other articles.
