A mathematician-turned-anthropologist by profession, Meenaxi Barkotoki, has her roots in Assam but has spent most of the last two decades in Germany. A keen chronicler of the written word, she has been a translator of Assamese literature since the last thirty years. Her translations have appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines and periodicals, including The Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India and in Asomiya Handpicked Fictions.
As the Managing Trustee of the Munin Barkotoki Memorial Trust, which supports and encourages young writers writing in Assamese, Barkotoki also translates and publishes selected writings of the winners of the Munin Barkotoki Literary Award. She is also a Founding Member of North East Writers’ Forum, a society dedicated to supporting writers writing in English from Northeast India and to supporting translations into English from the other languages of Northeast India.
Indian businessman Ashneer Grover is the former co-founder and managing director of the Indian fintech company BharatPe. Grover also appears as an investor on the reality TV show Shark Tank India.
Find Ashneer online:
Twitter: @Ashneer_Grover
LinkedIN: @in/Ashneer
Instagram: @ashneer.grover
Jahnavi Barua is a writer based in Bengaluru. Her first book, Next Door, a collection of short fiction, was published by Penguin India in 2008 to wide critical acclaim. The second, a novel, Rebirth, was published in 2010 and shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize. Undertow, published in 2020, is her third book. She was awarded the Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship for Creative Writing in 2006. Her books are on the syllabi of many universities and her short fiction has been widely anthologized.
Illustrator Bio:
Rajiv Eipe lives in Bangalore and works on animation and illustration projects. He likes to doodle in his sketchbook, drink more coffee than is good for him, maintain an untidy workspace and gaze into vacant spaces at regular intervals.
Dr Tanaya Narendra is an internationally trained medical doctor, embryologist, and scientist, who is passionate about medical
education.
After studying for a masters at the University of Oxford, she subsequently registered as a doctor in England, and committed to making public medical education her life’s goal. She is an elected Fellow of the prestigious Royal Society for Public Health.
For her groundbreaking work in medical education, Tanaya has been awarded Sexual Health Influencer of the Year 2020 by SH24-
the online sexual health partner of the NHS; she was also named among the Top 25 Disruptors of India 2021 by Cosmopolitan, and was selected the Health Influencer of the Year by the IHW Council, supported by the NITI Aayog and Ayushman Bharat.
She is now the most popular medical professional on social media in India. Tanaya runs @Dr_Cuterus, which has garnered over
one million followers on Instagram and over 50 million views on YouTube. She uses fairy tales, mannequins, fun GIFs, and hilariously relatable examples to talk in a jargon-free and scientific manner about complex medical and sexual education topics, all wrapped up with an inclusive and gender-neutral bow. In two years, Tanaya has built a thriving community that provides a safe place where no topic is too
taboo to talk about!
In whatever free time she has left, Tanaya likes to hang out with her rescue dog Samosa, pretends she can read Latin, and scuba dives
and eats her way around the world.
Aruna Gopakumar is a psychotherapist of repute-a CTA (Certified Transactional Analyst) and an MCC
(Master Certified Coach-ICF). She is the current president of SAATA (South Asian Association of Transactional Analysts). As a Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst, Aruna is passionately engaged in long-term training of aspiring Transactional Analysts, taking them through the rigorous journey of becoming competent, ethical professionals. She is an advocate of creative, experiential methods and integrates art, story and drama in her ways of working, with both individuals and groups. She has a Tedx Talk called ‘Psychotherapy, the New Normal’.
She founded a leadership development organization, Navgati (www.navgati.in), in 1999 after working in IBM and then Sasken. Today, Navgati is a market leader in the design and delivery of creative, high-impact leadership-development interventions. With an engineering degree from Anna University and an MBA degree from Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB), Aruna is on a lifelong quest to find innovative ways to help people realize their true potential.
Aruna lives in Bangalore with her husband, daughter, son, and two noisy black labradors.
Ajit Harisinghani is a speech therapist by profession and a traveller by passion. He lives and works in Pune and travels all over. The Living Road is his second book.
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.
