Archives: Authors

Nadeem Aslam is the author of the award-winning Season of the Rainbirds (1993) and The Wasted Vigil (2008). Born in Pakistan, he now lives in England.

Gita Mehta is a bestselling author and has written articles for a number of Indian, European and American magazines. Her books have been translated into thirteen languages and published in twenty seven countries. She lives in New York, London and India.

SRI M-spiritual teacher, social reformer, educationist and author-was born Mumtaz Ali into a Muslim family on 6 November 1949 in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. His transformational journey from young boy to yogi, is a story of single-minded discipline and dedication. He established the Satsang Foundation twenty years ago as a meeting point for spiritual seekers of all persuasions. Conversant with the principles and beliefs of most major religions, Sri M’s teachings seek to transcend the outer shell of all religions by exploring the core of their teachings and nurturing the innate goodness in every human being. Sri M’s autobiography, Apprenticed to a Himalayan Master: A Yogi’s Autobiography, was published in 2011 and became an instant bestseller. Further, Journey Continues: A Sequel to Apprenticed to a Himalayan Master was published in 2017. Sri M has also authored several texts on the Upanishads, on meditation and a novel, Shunya. His latest book, On Meditation: Finding Infinite Bliss and Power Within, was published by Penguin Random House in 2019. All his books have been translated into numerous Indian languages. Among the many awards and honours he has received for his contribution to society, Sri M was conferred with the Padma Bhushan, the third-highest civilian award in India, in January 2020 for distinguished service of high order in spirituality.

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.