Archives: Authors

Rohini Nilekani, a committed philanthropist, has been a journalist, author and social activist. She has worked in and contributed to publications such as Bombay Magazine, India Today, Sunday, the Times of India and Mint. Her debut novel, Stillborn, was published by Penguin in 1998. Since 2000, she has been active in the areas of education, microfinance and environment. She is the co-founder and chairperson of Pratham Books, which aims to put ‘A book in every child’s hands’. She chairs Arghyam, a foundation created with her personal endowment, which supports initiatives towards ‘Safe, sustainable water for all’.

Abraham Verghese is a physician and the author of two acclaimed books of non-fiction, The Tennis Partner and My Own Country. A Malayali, he was born and raised in Ehiopia. Dr Verghese attended Madras Christian College and later Madras Medical College, and since then has studied and worked in the USA. He is currently Professor of Internal Medicine and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford University. A graduate of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his essays and short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Granta. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Vikram Chandra’s first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize. His collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Eurasia Region). Sacred Games was awarded the Hutch Crossword Award for English Fiction and the Salon Book Award. His latest book is Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code, a non-fiction New York Times Editor’s Choice selection. Chandra is a recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship, and his work has been translated into nineteen languages.

Arun Kumar is a well-known economist and country’s leading authority on the black economy. He has written, studied and lectured extensively on this subject for nearly four decades. He was educated at Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Princeton University. He taught economics at JNU for three decades and retired in 2015.
Kumar’s focus areas include public finance, development economics, public policy and macroeconomics. His work has been published widely in these areas, both in the popular press and academic journals. He is currently the Malcolm Adiseshiah chair professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi.

Githa Hariharan has written novels, short fiction and essays over the last three decades. Her highly acclaimed works include The Thousand Faces of Night, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in 1993; the short story collection The Art of Dying; the novels The Ghosts of Vasu Master, When Dreams Travel, In Times of Siege, Fugitive Histories and I Have Become the TIde; and a collection of essays titled Almost Home: Cities and Other Places.

Hariharan has, over the years, been a cultural commentator through her essays, lectures and activism. In 1995, she challenged the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act as discriminatory against women. The case, Githa Hariharan and Another vs Reserve Bank of India and Another, led to a landmark Supreme Court judgment in 1999 on guardianship.

For more on the author and her work, see githahariharan.com

Devdutt Pattanaik is the author of over 25 books and over 500 articles on the relevance of mythology in modern times. He worked in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries for 15 years before devoting all his time to his passion for decoding beliefs of all cultures, modern and ancient, located beneath the veneer of rationality. Extremely knowledgeable and exceptionally insightful, Pattanaik also boasts of the added skill of simplifying his mythological accounts into delightful reads that engage young readers. He is the master storyteller of the very popular Fun in Devlok series and Pashu

Arthy Muthanna Singh is a children’s writer, freelance journalist, copywriter, editor and cartoonist based in Gurugram. She grew up on tea plantations in the Nilgiris. She has authored over thirty books for children and has been helping her mother conduct the Ooty Literary Festival since 2016. She was with Limca Book of Records for about thirteen years. She hopes to settle down in Coonoor or Goa someday soon.

K.M. Vasudevan Namboodiri, better known as Artist Namboodiri, is an eminent illustrator, painter and sculptor from Kerala. Born in Kerala in 1925, he was a disciple of renowned artist K.C.S. Panicker and studied painting at the Madras School of Fine Arts. He is known for his own style of line sketches, called ‘Rekhachitrangal’, and has drawn for many leading magazines as well as for significant writers of the twentieth century. Namboodiri received the Kerala State Award for the Best Art Direction for Uttarayanam, directed by G. Aravindan, in 1974. He is a recipient of the Raja Ravi Varma Award, 2003, and was the chair of the Kerala Lalitakala Academy.

Gita Krishnankutty is a renowned translator, having won the Crossword Award and the Central Sahitya Akademi Award.

Mamta Nainy is a children’s writer, editor and translator based in New Delhi. She spent some years in advertising before an apple fell on her head while she was sitting under a mango tree and she had her Eureka moment. She has been writing for children since then. She has authored many books for children, including A Brush with Indian Art which won The Hindu Young World-Goodbooks Award 2019 in the Best Book Non-Fiction category.

PICO IYER is the acclaimed and bestselling author of more than a dozen books translated into twenty-three languages, most recently The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise. His journalism regularly appears in Time, New York Times, New York Review of Books, Financial Times, and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide. His TED talks have been viewed over eleven million times. He divides his time between western Japan and central California.