Archives: Authors

Radhika Govindrajan is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Washington.

Shutapa Paul has been a journalist for over twelve years, having worked across print and electronic media. Currently, she is founder editor of NewCrop, a video-first, digital media platform for start-ups and entrepreneurs, and founder of a media consultancy, Dharma Media Consultants. A columnist, anchor and panel discussion moderator, Shutapa was selected as one of the fifteen Indians to lead the Australia India Youth Dialogue in 2017. In 2018, she was recognized as one of the ‘100 Women Faces’ by the Confederation of Women Entrepreneurs.

Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury is a Bangalore-based poet and writer. She is the author of the poetry collection Benaras: Where Even the Present is Ancient and the non-fiction title Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen: Bengali Cinema’s First Couple, which was nominated for a Crossword Book Award in 2013. She is the poetry and fiction editor of The Bangalore Review, a literary journal. She lives in a house with a family of dogs and poetry.

Sylvia Dyer was born in 1928 and grew up in the wilds of Champaran in north Bihar, on a plantation pioneered as an indigo estate by her great-grandfather, an Englishman. She spent ten years of schooling at St Helen’s Convent at Kurseong, Darjeeling, was married twice, and widowed both times, to Indian Army officers. There were two sons from her first marriage and a daughter from the second. She now lives in Pune and her two surviving children have settled abroad.

Anand Teltumbde is a leading public intellectual, author and civil rights activist. He’s also regarded as one of the foremost authorities on Ambedkar and the Dalit movement in India. A polymath, his scholarship ranges from socio-political analysis to big data analytics.

Among his significant books are The Radical in Ambedkar (ed., 2018), The Republic of Caste (2018), Dalits: Past, Present and Future (2016), Mahad: The Making of the First Dalit Revolt (2016), The Persistence of Caste (2010), and Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop (2008). Teltumbde regularly contributed to Mainstream, Frontier, Seminar and most leading English newspapers and wrote Margin Speak, one of the longest running columns in the Economic & Political Weekly. He held top management positions in his corporate career and taught at IIT, Kharagpur and Goa Institute of Management Business Management and Big Data Analytics respectively.

Happymon Jacob is the founder and director of the Council for Strategic and Defence Research in New Delhi, the editor of India’s World magazine, and a columnist for the Hindustan Times. His previous books include The Line of Control: Travelling with the Indian and Pakistani Armies, and Line on Fire: Ceasefire Violations and India–Pakistan Escalation Dynamics.

Jeanne Perrett has taught English for over twenty-five years, and is the author of a wide range of English language coursebooks for primary and pre-primary classes as well as children’s novels. She lives in Greece with her husband and their four children. Her first novel, Ash & Tara and the Emerald Dagger, was published by Puffin Books in 2010.

Bruno Macaes is a non-resident senior fellow at Hudson Institute, a senior advisor at Flint Global and a senior fellow at Renmin University, China. Formerly Portugal’s Europe minister (2013-15), he has been a regular commentator for CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera, and has written for the Financial Times, The Guardian and Foreign Affairs. His last book was The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order. He lives in Beijing.

William Dalrymple was born in Scotland. His first book, In Xanadu, written when he was twenty-two, was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. In 1989 he moved to Delhi where he lived for six years researching his second book, City of Djinns, which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. He then went on to write From the Holy Mountain (1997) and The Age of Kali (1998).

William Dalrymple is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Asiatic Society. He wrote and presented the television series Stories of the Raj and Indian Journeys, which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002. He is married to artist Olivia Fraser, and they have three children. They now divide their time between London and Delhi. White Mughals won the Wolfson Prize for History 2003 and the Scottish Book of the Year Prize, and was shortlisted for the PEN History Award.

HARDEEP SINGH PURI has had a distinguished four-decade career in diplomacy spanning both the bilateral and the multilateral arena. He held ambassadorial posts in London (1999-2002), Brazil (2006-08), and was India’s permanent representative to the UN in both Geneva (2002-05) and New York (2009-13). He presided over the UN Security Council in August 2011 and November 2012, and chaired its Counter-Terrorism Committee. He is the author of Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and The Politics of Chaos. He is presently union minister of state for housing and urban affairs in New Delhi.