Archives: Authors

Guru Madhavan is a biomedical engineer and senior policy adviser. He conducts research at the National Academy of Sciences and has been named a distinguished young scientist by the World Economic Forum. He lives in Washington, DC.

The Early Learning Program of Penguin Books offers a diverse collection of children’s books designed to support curriculum learning across various age groups, from infants and toddlers to pre-schoolers, ensuring engaging and age-appropriate content. These thoughtfully crafted books cater to the developmental needs of young learners and promote essential cognitive skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, and creativity, fostering a love for reading from an early age.

The list offers picture books, story books, coloring books, activity books, workbooks, reference books and other innovative titles and formats.

A third year undergraduate in B.A. English from Madras Christian College, Chennai, Megha Rao spent the first decade of her life in Singapore, only moving to Kerala when she was in her sixth grade.
Megha started writing when she was six, beginning with comic books. What started as speech bubbles soon turned into short stories, and then novels.
Apart from her writing, Megha is also a traveller and painter, and an avid fan of Josephine Wall.
Megha published her first novel Alice: The Netherworld in 2012 and its sequel Alice: The Inferno Conspiracy in 2014.

Muhammad Iqbal ‘Allama’ (Author)

Muhammad Iqbal ‘Allama’ (1877-1938) is best remembered in India for ‘Saare jahaan se acchha’, recited to this day as an alternate anthem. A pre-eminent poet of India in the early twentieth century, he eulogized the land and its peoples with his mellifluous verse. He published several collections, including Baang-e-Daraa (1924), Javed-Naama (1932) and Baal-e-Jibreel (1935). In his later years he became the voice of Islam in India, advocating its causes through his writings, particularly The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930), his poetry and public speeches. In Pakistan today, he is regarded and cherished as a founding father.

Arunava Sinha (Translator)
Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction into English. Twenty-eight of his translated works have been published so far. Born and brought up in Calcutta, he lives and works in Delhi.

Pavitra Kumar was born in Deolali, Maharashtra, in 1985. An army officer’s daughter, she travelled across India from a young age and developed a keen appreciation of people and places. She completed her undergraduate degree in journalism from Delhi University in 2003 before a short stint with CNN-IBN in Delhi. In 2006, Pavitra went to London to pursue a career in marketing and worked for digital marketing agencies in management roles, spending much of her time liaising with the press and writing professional articles representing her firm. At the same time, her love for writing pushed her to freelance with the-nri.com. She completed her MBA from the Carlson Institute of Management in May 2016, and continues to pursue her love for business and passion for writing. Pavitra lives in Lakeville, Minnesota, with her husband, Dr Aditya
Raghunathan, and mini goldendoodle, Lily. Trekking, swimming, reading and coffee keep her going when she isn’t writing.

Laxmi, transgender rights activist, Hindi film actor and Bharatanatyam dancer, is a celebrity.
Pooja Pande is a writer and editor with a keen interest in gender issues.

Khaled Ahmed is the consulting editor for Newsweek Pakistan, and former consulting editor for the Daily Times and the Friday Times. In a thirty-year-long career in journalism, he has written extensively on the ideology and politics of Pakistan.

His books include Pakistan: Behind the Ideological Mask (Lahore: Vanguard Books, 2000) and Pakistan: the State in Crisis (Lahore: Vanguard Books, 2001). His book on Pakistan, Sectarian War in 2011 is now in its third edition. His book Word for Word won the best book of the year award of the Academy of Letters Islamabad in 2012. Khaled Ahmed was awarded Presidential Pride of Performance Medal, 2013.

Samaresh Basu (1924-88) was an uncompromising chronicler of the working class. His gritty fiction featured workers, revolutionaries, and radicals who fought society and their own demons and disenchantment. A prolific writer of more than two hundred stories and a hundred novels, Basu also saw two of his novels briefly banned on charges of obscenity and one win the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award.

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838-94) is called the father of the Bengali novel and considered by many as its greatest novelist. He was a key figure of the Bengal Renaissance and closely associated with the Indian independence movement. Durgeshnandini (The Chieftain’s Daughter) was his first novel in Bengali and the first complete novel in Indian literature.

Sidin Vadukut’s bestselling debut novel Dork: The Incredible
Adventures of Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese was published in January
2010.
Born in a small town near Irinjalakuda in Kerala, Sidin spent most
of his growing years in Abu Dhabi eating falafals. Once even with
sambar. He is an engineer from NIT Trichy and an MBA from IIM
Ahmedabad. Over the last decade he has made auto parts, developed
online trading platforms, worked as a consultant and once had a
sizeable portion of a tree fall on him. Sidin is currently a columnist
and editor with the business newspaper Mint, a cricket columnist for
www.cricinfo.com, occasional contributor to the New York Times
and a full-time freelance Twitterer.
He lives in London with his remarkably patient wife, a plethora of
Apple products and a growing collection of Buddha statues. He blogs
at http://www.whatay.com and tweets with the handle @sidin.