Archives: Authors

Ameera Al Hakawati, the enigmatic author of Desperate in Dubai, has always known that she was born to be a writer. A natural storyteller, her career began at age three, when she told her very first story to her mother that explained the ‘truth’ behind the missing chocolate biscuits. Numerous writing projects and a creative writing degree later, the twenty-something year old Ameera moved to Dubai from London. Inspired by the fascinating lives of the women who dominated the glamorous city, she put pen to paper and created Desperate in Dubai, a blog that soon became an internet sensation among the expatriate community in Dubai. Desperate in Dubai is Ameera’s first novel. She is currently still based in Dubai where she lives with her husband and their hamster, Fat Sam.

Basharat Peer was born in Kashmir in 1977. He studied political science at Aligarh Muslim University and journalism at Columbia University. He has worked as a reporter at Rediff and Tehelka and has written for various publications including the Guardian, Financial Times, New Statesman and Foreign Affairs, where he was assistant editor. He is currently based in New York.

Romain Hayes is a historian who has specialized, for a decade, on German foreign policy during the Second World War. He is presently working on political and military interactions between Indian nationalists and the Japanese during the Second World War.

Nandini Sengupta is a Pondicherry-based journalist and an author of historical fiction and narrative history. After a chance visit to Ajanta Ellora caves, she became fascinated with India’s past in general and ancient and early medieval India in particular. For the next ten years, she read history for fun and when she began to write, it was history she turned to for material. Her book credits include the bestselling The Blue Horse And Other Amazing Animals from Indian History (Hachette, 2020), the Gupta Empire Trilogy-The King Within , The Poisoned Heart and The Ocean’s Own (HarperCollins India, 2017, 2019 and 2021 respectively) and The Story of Kalidas: The Gem Among Poets (Eicher Goodearth Publications, 2019). Rani Durgawati is her first narrative non-fiction biography.

Aman Sethi was born in Bombay in 1983. He studied chemistry in Delhi, and journalism in Chennai and New York. He is currently the Chhattisgarh correspondent for The Hindu. This is his first book.