Archives: Authors

The author of this work would love to set up an NGO to err . . . Save The Words. To donate, you need to adopt a word and promise to cherish it. The NGO will be called Grunt. Other than this the author would like to state that she has no favourite colour and thinks formal education is a dinosaur. This is enough information for a debut book. For more, wait for the sequel.

Shadaab Amjed Khan is a bollywood actor and scriptwriter by profession, hailing from one of the oldest film families in the country, with its most famous member being his father , the late actor Amjed Khan. He made his acting debute and worked in several films , while working behind the scenes as a scriptwriter, before finally moving on to his long -cherished dream of turning a novlist. He lives in Mumbai with his wife.

UPENDRANATH ASHK, 1910-1996, was one of Hindi literature’s best known and most controversial authors. Ashk was born in Jalandhar and spent the early part of his writing career as an Urdu author in Lahore. Encouraged by Premchand, he switched to Hindi, and a few years before Partition, moved to Bombay, Delhi and finally Allahabad in 1948, where he spent the rest of his life. By the time of his death, Ashk’s phenomenally large oeuvre spanned over a hundred volumes of fiction, poetry, memoir, criticism and translation. Ashk is perhaps best known for his six-volume novel cycle, Girti Divarein, or ‘Falling walls’—an intensely detailed chronicle of the travails of a young Punjabi man attempting to become a writer–which has earned the author comparisons to Marcel Proust. Ashk was the recipient of numerous prizes and awards during his lifetime for his masterful portrayal, by turns humorous and remarkably profound, of the everyday lives of ordinary people.
DAISY ROCKWELL is an artist and writer living in northern New England. She paints under the takhallus, or alias, Lapata (Urdu for ‘missing’), and has shown her artwork widely. Rockwell holds a PhD in Hindi literature and has taught Hindi-Urdu and South Asian literature at a number of US universities. Apart from her essays on literature and art, she has written Upendranath Ashk: A Critical Biography, The Little Book of Terror, a book of paintings and essays on the global war on terror, and the novel Taste. She has translated a collection of Ashk’s short stories, Hats and Doctors, published in 2013 as a Penguin Modern Classic.

Jerry Pinto is a writer of prose, poetry and children’s fiction in English and also a journalist. Some of Pinto’s noted titles include Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, Surviving Women, Leela: A Patchwork Life and Asylum and Other Poems. Pinto has translated rare works of Marathi into English, like Cobalt Blue and Baluta. His first novel, Em and the Big Hoom received the Sahitya Akademi Award (2016), the Windham-Campbell Literary Prize, The Hindu Literary Prize and the Crossword Book Award.
Of Goan origin, Pinto grew up in Mahim, Mumbai, and received his Liberal Arts degree from the Elphinstone College and a law degree from the Government Law College in Mumbai.

Naresh Fernandes is a journalist, an editor of Scroll.in and a consulting editor at National Geographic Traveler India. Fernandes is the author of Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay’s Jazz Age, City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay and Bombay Then/Mumbai Now. He has worked with the print media publications including the Times of India, the Wall Street Journal in New York and the Associated Press in Mumbai. He won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award for Taj Mahal Foxtrot.

Jagat S. Mehta was born in Udaipur in 1922 into one of the then princely state’s most prominent families. After degrees from Allahabad and Cambridge universities, he joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1947. He was chargé d’ affaires in China between 1963 and 1966, launched the foreign ministry’s policy planning division in 1966, was high commissioner to Tanzania between 1970 and 1974, and became Foreign Secretary in 1976, a post he held till 1979. During his career he led the ministry’s negotiations on many issues of critical importance including the Sino-Indian boundary question (1960), the comprehensive normalization of India-Pakistan relations (1976), the Farakka Agreement with Bangladesh (1977), and preventing the militarization of Pakistan after the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan (1978). He was a Fellow at Harvard in 1969-70 and again in 1980-81. He was at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC in 1981-82 and the Tom Slick Professor of World Peace at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, Austin, from 1983 to 1985. He later held the post of visiting professor at the university from 1986 to 1995. Jagat S. Mehta is the author of Militarization in the Third World (1985); The March of Folly in Afghanistan (2002); Negotiating for India (2006); and Rescuing the Future (2008). He has also published articles, inter alia, on diplomatic negotiations; democracy and South Asian security; world politics after the Cold War; international riparian problems; Non-Alignment; and India’s relations with China, Pakistan and Nepal. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2002. He remained associated with voluntary organizations in Udaipur until his death on 6 March 2014.

Eliza Crewe’s love affair with books began very early, when she first set foot in the magical Urbana Free Library in Urbana, Illinois. She took a brief detour through law school, but eventually made it back into books, first as a librarian and now as a writer. She lives in North Carolina with her husband, daughter and five hens.

NIKHIL GUMBHIR is the founder of Cloud
Mentor, a pioneer incubation platform for
children that aims to create the inventors
of tomorrow.

At just twenty-one years of age, Namrata Purohit is fitness coach to some of the best-known faces in the Indian fashion, fi lm and sport industries. She loves life and aspires to get people fi t the healthy and fun way.
A certified Pilates instructor, Namrata started her career at the age of sixteen, and is one of the youngest trained Stott Pilates instructors in the world. She runs her own fitness studio, The Pilates and Altitude Training Studio (www.pilatesaltitude.com), which enjoys the distinction of being the first studio in the world to offer both Pilates as well as a simulated altitude-training room under one roof, and which has been the Official Fitness Expert for The Femina Miss India International pageant from 2011 onwards. Namrata has played squash and football at the national and state levels, respectively. She is also pursuing her studies and has just graduated with a major in economics. Namrata and her father, renowned fitness expert, Samir Purohit, are the official Pilates coaches to the Mumbai City FC Team 2014, a part of the Indian Super League. She lives in Mumbai.

Subhadra Sen Gupta is a well-known children’s writer who has authored over twenty-five books, including mysteries, adventures, ghost stories and comic books.

REKHA KALINDI was born in a remote village in Bengal, 100 miles from Kolkata. Since her story was revealed, she has travelled all over India to speak and her international profile continues to grow. She is the recipient of India’s National Bravery Award.