Archives: Authors

Ken Spillman developed his imagination while playing games in bushland on the edge of one of Australia’s most isolated cities, and by reading adventures set in faraway places. He is now the author of around 80 books, published in around 20 languages. Ken is a frequent visitor to India and has written a number of books featuring sharp-witted young Indian characters. These include the Daydreamer Dev stories; Advaita the Writer(2011); No Fear, Jiyaa!(2017); and Radhika Takes the Plunge (2012), which was listed in 101 Indian Children’s Books We Love! For more information, visit www.kenspillman.com.

Aruni Kashyap is a writer and translator. He is the author of His Father’s Disease and the novel The House With a Thousand Stories. He has also translated from Assamese and introduced celebrated Indian writer Indira Goswami’s last work of fiction, The Bronze Sword of Thengphakhri Tehsildar. He won the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh, and his poetry collection, There is No Good Time for Bad News was a finalist for the 2018 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and 2018 Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Catapult, Bitch Media, The Boston Review, Electric Literature, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from Northeast, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, and others. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, Athens. He also writes in Assamese, and his first Assamese novel is Noikhon Etia Duroit.

Arundhathi Subramaniam is a poet and spiritual traveler. Her books include a volume on contemporary women on sacred journeys, Wild Women, Women Who Wear Only Themselves; the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life; anthologies of Bhakti poetry, Eating God, and of essays on sacred journeys, Pilgrim’s India; the much-reprinted Book of Buddha, among others.

Widely translated and anthologized, she is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award 2020 and the Mahakavi Kanhaiyalal Sethia award in 2024.

‘A fearless writer and performance storyteller with a big heart’ best describes Paro Anand, who was honoured with the Sahitya Akademi Bal Sahitya Puraskar Award in 2017 for Wild Child and Other Stories (now published as Like Smoke with additional content) and the Takshila Srijanpeeth Fellowship in 2020-21. She was invited to speak at the Harvard India Conference hosted at the Harvard Kennedy School. Recognized internationally and locally, including by former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, she has headed the National Centre for Children’s Literature; interacted with over three lakh people, primarily children in difficult circumstances; and now runs a programme called Literature in Action.

Translated into German and Spanish, No Guns at My Son’s Funeral was on the IBBY Honour List. The Little Bird Who Held the Sky Up with His Feet was featured in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up, which is an international gold standard of the world’s best children’s literature. Her book, Being Gandhi, brings Gandhian values front and centre into contemporary children’s lives. She received the Kalinga Karubaki Literary Award for Fearless Women Writers in 2019 and was selected by BBC Hindi for their #100Women Project, a project highlighting the challenges and achievements of women in India. She has a podcast called Literature in Action on Hubhopper.

Navtej Sarna is the author the novel, Crimson Spring, which won the KLF award for the Best Fiction Book of 2022 and was longlisted for
the Dublin Literary Award and the JCB Prize for Literature 2022.
His earlier works include the novels The Exile and We Weren’t Lovers Like That; the short story collection Winter Evenings; non-fiction titles Second Thoughts, The Book of Nanak and Indians at Herod’s Gate; as well as the translations Savage Harvest and Zafarnama. He is a regular contributor to journals both in India and abroad. A professional diplomat for nearly four decades, Sarna was India’s ambassador to the United States, high commissioner to the UK and ambassador to Israel. He has also served as secretary to the
Government of India and as the foreign office spokesperson. His earlier diplomatic assignments were in Moscow, Warsaw, Thimphu, Tehran, Geneva and Washington DC.

Jeet Thayil was born in Kerala, India, and educated in Hong Kong, New York and Bombay. He is a performance poet, librettist, novelist and songwriter. Thayil’s collections of poetry include Gemini II: Selected Poems, Apocalypso, English, and These Errors are Correct. He has edited Give the Sea Change and It Shall Change: 56 Indian Poets, Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora, and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. His first novel, Narcopolis, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won a DSC Prize for South Asian literature.

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); 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). (2017). She co-edited the pioneering Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History (2000; updated edition 2020). 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.

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.

R. GOPALAKRISHNAN (Gopal) is an author, speaker and corporate adviser, with three parts to his career of over fifty years: first, thirty-one years in Hindustan Unilever, ending as vice chairman; second, seventeen years as director, Tata Sons; and third, since 2016, as author and corporate adviser. Currently, he is the non-executive chairman of Castrol India, and independent director of Hemas Holdings PLC, Sri Lanka. He is also distinguished professor at IIT Kharagpur, and executive-in-residence at Mumbai’s prestigious SP Jain Institute of Management and Research. He has so far authored fifteen books, notably, The Case of the Bonsai Manager, When the Penny Drops, A Biography of Innovations and Crash: Lessons from the Entry and Exit of CEOs. Gopal greatly welcomes feedback and comments on this book at rgopal@themindworks.me.

R. NARAYANAN began his career in Coca-Cola and Nestlé, followed by extensive experience in advertising. Since the 1980s, Narayanan has been deeply involved with start-ups. He founded and ran a company to make and market Big Fun, a chewing gum product. His next venture was to create a machine or business system to dispense dosa, just like hamburgers, an offering that he branded as Dosa King. He then became a passionate participant in angel investing and mentoring.