Archives: Authors

M. Asaduddin is an author, critic and translator in several languages. His books include Premchand in World Languages: Translation, Reception and Cinematic Representations; Filming Fiction: Tagore, Premchand and Ray; A Life in Words; The Penguin Book of Classic Urdu Stories; Lifting the Veil: Selected Writings of Ismat Chughtai; For Freedom’s Sake: Manto; and (with Mushirul Hasan) Image and Representation: Stories of Muslim Lives in India. He has been a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA, and a Charles Wallace Trust Fellow at the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. He is a regular speaker at literary festivals, and his translations have been recognized with the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the Katha and A.K. Ramanujan awards for translation, as well as the Crossword Book Award.

MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON is Professor Emeritus of Urdu literature and Islamic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a critic, short-story writer, translator and the editor of The Annual of Urdu Studies (1993-2014). He has translated half a dozen anthologies of Urdu fictional writing. His latest published work is The Occult (Penguin), a translation of the critically acclaimed Urdu writer Naiyer Masud’s volume of short stories, Seemiya.

Nikita Upadhyay is the former digital head of Cosmopolitan, a website she grew organically from 9 million to 80 million in two years. She now does the same for renowned international brands worldwide. Nikita is a beauty influencer and content creator online, and has worked with major cosmetic and wellness brands, including The Body Shop, Bath & Body Works, MAC, Kama Ayurveda, Innisfree to name a few, with major tie-ups with Amazon, Nykaa and other international luxury brands.
She has also practised Bharatnatyam for nine years and has performed at the national level. Apart from beauty, she also writes about travel and relationships on her website www.nikitaupadhyay.com and would love to see anything you create from this book on instagram: @nikitaupadhyay

A.K. BHATTACHARYA-AKB to every journalist-set the bar for business reporting as the chief of bureau at the Economic Times in the early 1990s, when economic reforms raged. He had a ringside view to many other disruptions, creative and otherwise, during his four decades in journalism, a journey that started when he switched careers after a year of teaching. AKB then went on to become the editor of the Pioneer and Business Standard. He is now Business Standard‘s editorial director and a writer of two long-running columns.

WALTER REID is a historian educated at the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the author of a number of acclaimed books on British politics and history, including Keeping the Jewel in the Crown: The British Betrayal of India and most recently Neville Chamberlain: The Passionate Radical. He raises sheep and cattle in Scotland and grows olives in France. He is married to Janet Reid, a journalist, and has two adult daughters.

Habiburahman, known as Habib, is a Rohingya. Born in 1979 in Burma (now Myanmar), he escaped torture, persecution, and detention in his country, fleeing first to neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia, where he faced further discrimination and violence, and then, in December 2009, to Australia, by boat. Habib spent 32 months in detention centres before being released. He now lives in Melbourne. Today, he remains stateless, unable to benefit from his full human rights. Habib founded the Australian Burmese Rohingya Organization (ABRO) to advocate for his people back in Burma and for his community. He is also a translator, social worker, the support service co-ordinator at Refugees, Survivors and Ex-Detainees (RISE), and the secretary of the international Rohingya organisation Arakan Rohingya National Organisation (ARNO), based in the UK. The hardship and the human rights violation Habib has faced have made him both a spokesperson for his people and a target for detractors of the Rohingya cause.

Sophie Ansel is a French journalist, author, and director, who lived in South Asia for several years. It was during a five-month stay in Burma that she first encountered the Rohingya people and heard of their plight. She returned to the country several times, and also visited the refugee communities in neighbouring countries like Thailand and Malaysia, where she met Habib in 2006. Habib helped Sophie to better understand the persecution faced by the Rohingya, and she has been advocating for their cause since 2011. When the Myanmar government accelerated the genocide of the Rohingya in June 2012, while Habib was detained in Australia, she helped him to write his story, and the story of his people.

Andrea Reece is a translator of novels, short stories, and works of non-fiction from French and Spanish.

Manu Bhagavan teaches at Hunter College and the Graduate Center-CUNY, where he is a professor of history, human rights, and public policy and Senior Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. He is the author or editor of seven other books, including the critically-acclaimed The Peacemakers. He frequently appears in the media to comment on global affairs. Manu lives in New York City.

K. Satchidanandan is a leading Indian poet He is also perhaps the most translated of contemporary Indian poets, having 32 collections of translation in 19 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, English, Irish, French, German and Italian, besides all the major Indian languages. He has 24 collections of poetry, four books of travel, a full length play and a collection of one-act plays, two books for children and several collections of critical essays, including five books in English on Indian literature besides several collections of world poetry in translation. He has been a Professor of English, and also the chief executive of the Sahitya Akademi, the Director of the School of Translation Studies, Indira Gandhi Open University, Delhi and National Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. He is a Fellow of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi and has won 52 literary awards from different states and countries, including the Sahitya Akademi award, India-Poland Friendship Medal from the Government of Poland, Knighthood from the Government of Italy and World Prize for Poetry for Peace from the Government of the UAE. His recent collections in English include While I Write, Misplaced Objects and Other Poems, The Missing Rib: Collected Poems, Not Only the Oceans, Questions from the Dead and The Whispering Tree: Poems of Love and Longing.

Aditya Mukherjee retired as Professor of Contemporary History, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was elected the General President of the Indian History Congress 2023-24, and was visiting Professor/Fellow at premier institutions like the Duke University (USA), University of Tokyo, University of Rome, Institutes of Advanced Study at Nantes (France), Lancaster (UK) and Sao Paolo (Brazil). He is the author of Imperialism, Nationalism and the Making of the Indian Capitalist Class, Political Economy of Colonial and Post-Colonial India and co-authored three bestselling titles India Since Independence,India’s Struggle for Independence and RSS, School Texts and the Murder of Mahatma Gandhi: The Hindu Communal Project.

Arnav Mukherjee is an author interested in screenwriting and film-making.