Archives: Authors

Priyanka R Khanna grew up in Mumbai and graduated from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. After graduation, she worked in the public relations department of Hearst Magazines in New York. She
returned to Mumbai and joined the launch team of Vogue India, where she spent fifteen years as the fashion features director, overseeing fashion-related content across digital and print.
Khanna, who was first published in The Hindu at the age of sixteen, continues to write and speak on art and design, fashion and culture.
She lives in Mumbai, with her husband and two children.
This is her first novel.

Iffat Nawaz was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on June 7, 1978. She worked for over a decade in humanitarian and development projects in USA, Asia and Africa. In 2016, she published a book titled Untold stories of Tanguar Haor, a collection of true accounts of a local community that lives in a water basin at the border of India and Bangladesh, commissioned by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Iffat’s weekly column, ‘Under a Different Sky’, ran for 10 years in Bangladesh’s English newspaper The Daily Star. Her writing has appeared in the Huffington Post, Zubaan Books, Himal Southasian and The Indian Quarterly. Since 2018, Iffat has been living in Pondicherry where she is devoted to the teachings of Sri Aurobindo.

Multiple award-winning designer, self-taught painter, TEDx speaker, design educator-Ahlawat Gunjan wears many hats. A graduate of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, he has a master’s degree in graphic design from The Glasgow School of Art, UK. Ahlawat has also spent a semester at Indiana-Purdue University, USA, focusing on design thinking, innovation and leadership. His overlapping interests in art and literature not only made him pursue a career in publishing but they also inform his keen interest in visual authorial interventions and curatorship. This allows him to shape the visual personality of the book at every step of its creation. He strongly believes in the art and power of making and therefore himself constructs most of the images for his book covers.
Trained at Lars Mullers Switzerland and Faber & Faber, UK, Ahlawat has worked closely with Penguin, Faber and Faber, Hachette, Little Brown, Hodder, Random House, Quercus, Hurst, Scribe AUS, Pantheon and Knopf Doubleday USA. Currently, he is Head of Design at Penguin Random House, India, and spends his free time painting. His paintings have been showcased in solo shows in New Delhi and Dehradun. He has won numerous awards and accolades, including the Oxford Bookstore cover prize for Gun Island (2021) and the Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival for Rising Heat (2020).
Ahlawat lives in New Delhi with his piano and a room full of paints and brushes. He can be reached at ahlawatgunjan@gmail.com.

R. Rajasree was born in Parassinikkadavu in northern Kerala in 1977. She currently teaches at the Government Brennan College at Thalassery. She has a PhD in Malayalam and her early writing includes books on detective fiction and on the construction of female protagonists in Malayalam. Her first novel, titled Kalyaaniyum Daakshaayaniyum Ennu Peraaya Randu Sthreekalute Kata, wrote originally as a series of Facebook posts, was published in 2019. Hailed as an exciting new voice in Malayalam, it has subsequently won major literary awards in Malayalam, notably the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award (2021).

J DEVIKA is a feminist historian, social researcher and translator, currently with the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. She translates literary writing from
Malayalam to English and social science writing from English to Malayalam. She has translated the literary writings of K.R. Meera, Sarah Joseph, Unni R., Ambikasuthan Mangad and Lalithambika Antharjanam, among others. Her website, www. swatantryavaadini.in, is a collection of translations of the writings of early twentieth-century feminists in Malayalam-speaking regions.

Raj Shamani is an entrepreneur, motivational speaker and social media influencer. He has featured on the ‘Top 5 Young Influencers of India’ list (YourStory), as well as on the ‘Top 10 Young Entrepreneurs in India’ list (Asian Age). His podcast, Figuring Out, is the top podcast on entrepreneurship in the country. He is the youngest Indian to speak at the United Nations Assembly. He has given four TEDx Talks and over 200 keynotes in over twenty-six countries.

After studying physics at St Stephens College in Delhi, Saurabh Kirpal read law at the University of Oxford and did his master’s in law at the University of Cambridge. He did a brief stint working with the United Nations in Geneva before returning to Delhi. There, he has been practicing at the Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court and has been designated as a Senior Advocate by a unanimous Court. He has appeared in a range of matters covering a diverse range of subjects from commercial to constitutional law. This is reflected in the variety of clients he has appeared for—from Anil Ambani in his legal battle against his brother to being the counsel for Navtej Johar, Ritu Dalmia and others in the case that led to the reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. He also argued the case seeking recognition of same sex marriage before the Supreme Court. A self-described ‘accidental activist’ he also is the managing trustee of the Naz Foundation Trust, the NGO that first fought for decriminalization of homosexuality in India. He is editor of Sex and the Supreme Court, an anthology about issues relating to law, gender and sexuality and has also authored the book Fifteen judgments: Cases that Shaped India’s Financial Landscape.

Mufti Mudasir Farooqi is a faculty in the Department of English, University of Kashmir. Proficient in English, Kashmiri, Urdu, Persian and Arabic, he has made academic contributions to several areas such as literary theory and criticism, postmodern drama, Kashmir history and literature, Indo-Persian literature and Islamic studies. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the research programme ‘Future Philology: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship’ at Freie University of Berlin in 2012-13.
His English translation of Kashmir’s foremost Persian poet Tahir Ghani Kashmiri The Captured Gazelle: The Poems of Ghani Kashmiri was published as a Penguin Classic in 2013 while an annotated Urdu translation of Ghani’s complete works titled Aatash-e Toor: Deewan-e Ghani Kashmiri has come out in 2022.

Mahmud Ga¯mi stands out among the Kashmiri poets as a pioneer in introducing the Persian genres of the ghazal, nazm, masnavi and na¯t into Kashmiri. Not only is he the first truly prolific poet of the language, but much of his poetry is also remarkable for its beauty of expression and depth of thought. His vatsuns (lyrical poems) and masnavis (narrative poems) such as ‘Yusuf Zulaykha’, ‘Khusrau Shi¯ri¯n’, ‘Layla Majnun’ and ‘Sheikh San’a¯n’ have rightly been acclaimed as significant contributions to Kashmiri poetry.

VINOY THOMAS hails from Nellikkampoyil, Iritty, in north Kerala. A schoolteacher by profession, he is one of the most promising young writers in Malayalam. His short-story collections include Ramachi, Mullaranjanam and Adiyormisiha Enna Novel. His debut novel, Karikkottakkary (English translation soon to be published by Penguin Random House India) was selected as one of the five best novels in the DC Books competition. His second novel, Puttu (Anthill), won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for the best Malayalam novel of 2021. In 2019, Ramachi had won the same award for short stories. Vinoy has also authored a children’s book, Anatham Piriyatham. His short stories have been made into movies. He is also a gifted scriptwriter and has to his credit a few acclaimed movies.