Archives: Authors

Born in north-eastern India in 1970, Siddhartha Deb is the author of two novels. A contributing editor to The New Republic, Deb’s journalism, essays and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, n+1, Caravan, the Nation, the Baffler and the Times Literary Supplement. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Society of Authors, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University and the Howard Foundation at Brown University.

A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was one of India’s most distinguished scientists, responsible for the development of India’s first satellite launch vehicle and the operationalization of strategic missiles. He was also the President of India from 2002 until 2007.
Yagnaswami Sundara Rajan is a well-recognized authority and a thought leader on technology development, business management and society linkages. He held various positions of responsibility related to science and technology between 1988 and 2002 and has shaped key policies and implemented several successful R&D projects with industry participation. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2012.
Srijan Pal Singh is an engineer and management graduate from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He was with the Indian Institute of Space Sciences and Technology (IIST) where he directly worked with Kalam as a scientific advisor.

Namita Gokhale has authored twenty five works and is co-founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Her debut novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion is an audacious satire of Delhi’s elite, and has been issued as a Penguin Modern Classic. Her eclectic body of work includes a collection of marvellous Himalayan folktales for young readers Whispering Mountains, the novella Never Never Land, collections Life on Mars and Mystics and Sceptics- Searching Himalayan Masters, and the anthology Treasures of Lakshmi. Gokhale’s work spans different genres, including novels, short fiction, Himalayan studies, mythology, travel, books for young readers, and a play. She is the recipient of various prizes and awards, including the prestigious Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Literature) Award in 2021 for her novel Things to Leave Behind.

Her commitment to cross cultural dialoging seeps into her contributions as festival co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival where she has helped create a global center for ideas and literary exchange, while showcasing the rich diversity of the multilingual Indian identity. Gokhale’s endeavors as cultural interlocutor and catalyst are varied and extensive. In the 2010s she created and hosted Kitaabnama, a multilingual television show on Doordarshan which brought writers, translators, scholars, and artists from across India and the world in conversations about books and culture.

Gokhale is deeply influenced by a love for the Himalayas, carrying the mountains in her voice and imagination. Her work revives myth and oral traditions, nurtures new voices, and brings literary dialogue into public discourse.

Sohaila Abdulali was born in Mumbai. She has a BA from Brandeis University in economics and sociology and an MA from Stanford University in communication. She is the author of two novels as well as children’s books and short stories. She lives in New York with her family.

Anil Ananthaswamy is an award-winning journalist and former staff writer and deputy news editor for the London-based New Scientist magazine. He has been a guest editor for the science writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and organizes and teaches an annual science journalism workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, India. He is a freelance feature editor for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science’s Front Matter. He contributes regularly to the New Scientist, and has also written for Nature, National Geographic News, Discover, Nautilus, Matter, the Wall Street Journal and the UK’s Literary Review. His first book, The Edge of Physics, was voted book of the year in 2010 by Physics World, and his second book, The Man Who Wasn’t There, won a Nautilus Book Award in 2015 and was long-listed for the Pen/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award (2016).

Bulbul Sharma has published five collections of short stories, a novel, Banana-Flower Dreams (Penguin), and three books for children, including The Ramayana for Children (Puffin). At present, she is working on a collection of short stories for neo-literate children. Her stories have been translated into French, Italian, German and Finninsh. She has also held several exhibitionsof her paintings in India and abroad, and her paintings are in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Lalit Kala Akademi and the Chandigarh Museum, as well as in the corporate and private collections.