Archives: Authors

UPENDRANATH ASHK, 1910-1996, was one of Hindi literature’s best known and most controversial authors. Ashk was born in Jalandhar and spent the early part of his writing career as an Urdu author in Lahore. Encouraged by Premchand, he switched to Hindi, and a few years before Partition, moved to Bombay, Delhi and finally Allahabad in 1948, where he spent the rest of his life. By the time of his death, Ashk’s phenomenally large oeuvre spanned over a hundred volumes of fiction, poetry, memoir, criticism and translation. Ashk is perhaps best known for his six-volume novel cycle, Girti Divarein, or Falling Walls-an intensely detailed chronicle of the travails of a young Punjabi man attempting to become a writer-which has earned the author comparisons to Marcel Proust. Ashk was the recipient of numerous prizes and awards during his lifetime for his masterful portrayal, by turns humorous and remarkably profound, of the everyday lives of ordinary people.

Anupama Chopra is a film critic, national award-winning book author and journalist. She is the editor of The Hollywood Reporter India, founder of Film Companion Studios and chairperson of the Film Critics Guild. She has covered cinema since 1993 in multiple mediums—print, television and digital. She has worked with India Today, NDTV 24×7 and Star World. She has also written about cinema for various international publications, including The New York Times and Sight and Sound. Anupama has authored several books, including King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema, which was featured on the ‘Editor’s Choice’ list of the New York Times Sunday book review and translated into German, Indonesian and Polish. Anupama received an M.A. in journalism from Northwestern University.

Parvati Sharma is a Delhi-based author. Her debut was a collection of short stories called The Dead Camel and Other Stories of Love. She has also written a novel, Close to Home; a historical biography, Jahangir: An Intimate Portrait of a Great Mughal; and two books for children, The Story of Babur and Rattu & Poorie’s Adventures in History: 1857.

Abhinav is a Mumbai-based software developer working for a financial services firm. His debut book The Sage’s Secret is the first instalment in the Kalki Chronicles. He has since published a second book in the series, Kali’s Retribution.

You can connect with Abhinav at:
Instagram: http://instagram.com/am_abhinav
Goodreads: http://goodreads.com/am_abhinav

Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty is a Delhi-based journalist who covers the North-east for the news website the Wire. Born in Golaghat, Assam, she graduated from the Gauhati University in 1995. She began her journey in journalism in 1996 with the United News of India (UNI), thus breaking the glass ceiling to become the first woman from the North-east to be employed as a journalist in its New Delhi office. Her reportage on the North-east began in The Hindu after she won the Inclusive Media Fellowship of the Centre for Development Studies (CSDS) in 2011 to write a series on the loss of livelihood due to annual erosion in Assam’s Majuli island, Asia’s largest riverine island, in the Brahmaputra river.
A rare chance to utilise the digital space for news about the North-east from a New Delhi newsroom led her to join Wire. In 2017, she received the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award for feature writing.
Her English translation of Sahitya Akademi award winning Assamese writer Rita Chowdhury’s novel Mayabritta is slated for publication in 2020.

Shiv Malik is a former investigative journalist who, along with reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan, worked for the Guardian for five years, breaking exclusive front-page stories on everything from UK austerity to secret ISIS documents. He is the co-author of the 2010 cult economics book Jilted Generation, and co-founder of the think tank, the Intergenerational Foundation.

Dr. A.V. (Sheenu) Srinivasan has resided in the United States since 1961. In addition to a long career in engineering research and education, he has developed and taught courses on the ancient Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata at the University of Connecticut and Wesleyan University. He is the primary founder of the Connecticut Valley Hindu Temple Society and the driving force in the establishment of the Satyanarayana Temple in Middletown, Connecticut.

His publications include A Hindu Primer: Yaksha Prashna (1984), the second edition released by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in 2002, and now in its third revised, enlarged edition, from Vision Books. His 2011 J Wiley publication, Hinduism for Dummies, is also available in India. Aside from books and articles in professional engineering journals, he has also published a number of articles on Hinduism and related topics in Indian-American newspapers and journals, and a series of guidebooks on Hindu religious ceremonies.

Shuja Nawaz is a globally recognized political and strategic analyst. Currently, he is a distinguished fellow, South Asia Center, at the well-known bi-partisan think tank, the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC. In January 2009, he was made the first director of the Council’s South Asia Center.
He is the author of Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within. He is also the principal author of FATA: A Most Dangerous Place, Pakistan in the Danger Zone: A Tenuous US–Pakistan Relationship, Learning by Doing: The Pakistan Army’s Experience with Counterinsurgency, Who Controls Pakistan’s Security Forces?, Countering Militancy and Terrorism in Pakistan: The Civil–Military Nexus, and with Mohan Guruswamy, with a foreword by former Secretary of State George Shultz, India–Pakistan: The Opportunity Cost of Conflict.

Frits Staal wrote about language, philosophy and ritual buthis scientific pursuits encompassed diverse areas and disciplines. Born inAmsterdam in 1930, he studied several languages, including Greek and Arabic,but concentrated on physics and mathematical logic before a Government of Indiascholarship took him to India, Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. He travelled onboth sides of the Himalayas, taught and did research for extended periods in Europeand Asia, but spent most of his life in the Departments of Philosophy and ofSouth and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley,where he was Professor Emeritus. His most well-known books are Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar, Universals: Studies in Indian Logic andLinguistics and Rules without Meaning.After retirement, he moved to Thailand, having long predicted that civilizationwould return to Asia under the intellectual guidance of India and China. He passed away in 2012.