Archives: Authors

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is President of the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, and a leading columnist.

Nayantara Sahgal has written ten novels, three autobiographical works, short stories, and wide-ranging literary and political commentary. She has received the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Sinclair Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Leeds. She is a Member of the American Academy of Arts @ Sciences. She was associated with the founding of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties and served as a vice-president during the 1980’s. She returned her Satya Akademi Award in protest against the vigilante murder of three writers and the Akademi’s silence at the time, and is engaged in an on-going protest against the assault on freedom of expression and democratic rights.

Nayantara Sahgal is an award-winning writer of nine novels and eight non-fiction works. She is associated with the founding of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sahgal has held fellowships at many prestigious institutes in the US and is the recipient of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (1987), the Sahitya Akademi Award (1986), which she returned in 2015, and the Sinclair Prize (1985).

Born on a mud floor in Bengal in the midst of the struggle for Indian independence, Dr Bhaumik survived colonial oppression, cyclone, epidemic, and famine to earn a PhD in physics from IIT and a Sloane Foundation fellowship for postdoctoral work at UCLA. Later he achieved international recognition and success as a co-inventor of the laser technology that made LASIK eye surgery possible. He has been awarded an honoray DSc degree for lifetime academic achievement from IIT.

Dr Bhaumik lives in Southern California.

Nalini Ramachandran‘s works for young readers cover a variety of subjects and styles-from a textbook on history to tales of horror and mystery; from a graphic novel cum biography to narratives from mythology; from legend and lore to humour and more. She began writing for children when working with India’s only all-comics children’s magazine, Tinkle. Today, her short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Gifts of Teaching and Scary Tales. She is the author of Detective Sahasasimha: The Case of the Disappearing Books; APJ Abdul Kalam: One Man, Many Missions (which won the ‘Best of Indian Children’s Writing: Contemporary Awards 2019’ in the ‘Comics/Graphic Novels’ category); and the non-fiction children’s book Lore of the Land: Storytelling Traditions of India. She also edits children’s books and holds workshops on creative writing and storytelling. To know more about her work, visit www.authornalini.com.

Shoma Narayanan was an only child and grew up in a house full of books. While she spent every spare minute reading, she never thought of becoming a writer—she wanted to be a teacher, just like her parents. As it happened, after getting an engineering degree and an MBA, she ended up working in a bank instead. A few years ago, she took up writing as a hobby and was soon published. Her books have been translated into more than ten languages, including French, Italian, German and Hindi.

Laurence Louër is a researcher at Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI) in Paris. She is an Arabist and specializes in Middle-Eastern studies.

Christophe Jaffrelot is a senior research fellow at CERI and the author of the critically acclaimed The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience as well as the editor of Pakistan at the Crossroads: Domestic Dynamics and External Pressures.

Laurence Louër is a researcher at Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI) in Paris. She is an Arabist and specializes in Middle-Eastern studies. Christophe Jaffrelot is a senior research fellow at CERI and the author of the critically acclaimed The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience as well as the editor of Pakistan at the Crossroads: Domestic Dynamics and External Pressures.

Stephen Alter is the author of seven books of fiction and five books of non-fiction, most recently Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief: Inside the World of Indian moviemaking. He has co-edited (with Wimal Dissanayake) The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories. As a writer-in-residence at MIT, he received both a Guggenheim and a Fulbright fellowship.
Stephen Alter now lives and writes in India.

Juggi Bhasin was one of the first television journalists in India. He has worked with Doordarshan News and Lok Sabha Television as a reporter and anchor. Among the first Indian journalists to go to North Korea and report from there, he has also covered Kashmir and other insurgency-hit areas. He also has to his credit news reports on the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
Bhasin, who acts on stage, is the creator of the popular graphic novel Agent Rana, which appears in a major national daily.
He can be contacted at juggibhasin@gmail.com.