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.
Kaare Sørensen is an investigative journalist who has covered Islamic terrorism and international affairs extensively. He has lived in New York, travelled to Pakistan, Yemen and Iran, and covered the Arab Spring during the violent clashes in Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2011. For many years a reporter on politics, terrorism, surveillance, and the intelligence agencies for the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, he is now with the national television station TV2. For The Mind of a Terrorist, Kaare Sørensen won the 2014 FUJ-Prisen, the prestigious award for best investigative book from the Danish Association for Investigative Journalism. He lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Hridayesh Joshi is senior editor, National Affairs, NDTV India.
Vibhuti Narain Rai, former police officer, is an eminent novelist in Hindi.
Duvvuri Subbarao served as governor of the Reserve Bank of India for five years (2008-13). Prior to that, he was finance secretary to the Government of India (2007-08), and secretary to the prime minister’s Economic Advisory Council (2005-07).
Topping the civil services examination in 1972, Subbarao joined the Indian Administrative Service. In a career spanning thirty-five years, he held various positions in the state Government of Andhra Pradesh and in the federal Government of India, and was actively involved in formulating and implementing economic and financial sector reforms at the national and subnational levels.
Subbarao is currently a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the National University of Singapore where he spends six months of the year.
Dave Besseling was born and raised in Canada, and has lived pretty much everywhere but there after skipping his college graduation to go travelling for a decade, which led to his memoir, The Liquid Refuses to Ignite. He landed in India for the first time in 2008 and has been in and out of the subcontinent ever since, working as a writer and journalist in Bangalore, Delhi and now Bombay, where he is the deputy editor of GQ India.
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.
