Archives: Authors

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.

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of seven novels, including, most recently, Friend of My Youth, as well as a work of non-fiction, Calcutta, and collections of short stories, poetry, essays, and a critical study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry. He has received the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Award, the Encore Prize, the LA Times Book Prize, and the Sahitya Akademi Award, among other accolades. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Chaudhuri is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia and Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University. Alongside this, he is an admired singer in the North Indian classical tradition and a composer and performer in a celebrated project that brings together the raga, blues and jazz with a variety of other musical traditions. He received the Sangeet Samman from the government of West Bengal. Chaudhuri is regularly featured on radio and TV; his version of ‘Summertime’ was featured on the BBC 4 documentary, Gershwin’s Summertime: the Song that Conquered the World.

Maneka Gandhi is an Indian politician, animal rights activist, and environmentalist. She served as a member of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian parliament, and is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Giles Tillotson is well known as a writer and lecturer on Indian history and
architecture. He taught at the University of London from 1990 to 2004, since
when he has been living in Gurgaon, near Delhi. His earlier books include
Mughal India, Jaipur Nama and Taj Mahal, all published by Penguin. This
is his fi rst work of fi ction.

Ruth Vanita (Author)
Ruth Vanita taught at Delhi University for twenty years and is now professor at the University of Montana. She was founding co-editor of Manushi 1978-90. She is the author of several books, including Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (1996); Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India (2005); Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture (2005), Gender, Sex and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India 1780–1870 (2012); Dancing with the Nation: Courtesans in Bombay Cinema (2017). Her first novel, Memory of Light, appeared in 2020.

She is the author of over sixty articles on British and Indian literature, and has translated many works of fiction and poetry from Hindi and Urdu to English, most notably Chocolate: Stories on Male-Male Desire by Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’ (2008). She divides her time between Missoula and Gurgaon.

Saleem Kidwai (Author)
Saleem Kidwai is a historian and independent scholar, who taught at Ramjas College, Delhi University, for twenty years. He has published several academic essays on medieval and modern India, and translated several works, including Song Sung True: A Memoir by Malka Pukhraj and a collection of Syed Rafiq Hussain’s short stories, The Mirror of Wonders. Apart from the author herself, he is the only person to have translated the novels of Qurratulain Hyder, Chandni Begum and Ship of Sorrow.