Tripurdaman Singh is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. Born in Agra, Uttar Pradesh, Tripurdaman read politics and international studies at the University of Warwick, and subsequently earned an MPhil in modern South Asian studies and a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge. He has been a visiting fellow at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and an Indian Council of Historical Research Fellow in India.
A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, Tripurdaman’s books include Imperial Sovereignty and Local Politics (Cambridge University Press) and Nehru (Harper Collins).
Rakesh K. Kaul, an IIT gold medallist, migrated to the US in 1972. He was a founding contributor to the first Chair of India Studies at University of California, Berkeley, the Center for the Advanced Study of India at University of Pennsylvania and the Mattoo Center for India Studies at the State University of New York. He is the author of the bestseller The Last Queen of Kashmir. Kaul has had a distinguished business career as CEO and held leadership positions of publicly traded companies in the US. He serves as the Vice Chair of the Indo-American Arts Council.
Jerry Pinto began writing at the age of three. His first published work was Jerand’s Jovial Journal, in collaboration with his sister Andrea Pinto. This magnificent work of staggering genius, as it was described by the authors, has been lost to posterity. It is rumoured darkly, where dark rumours rumble, that Indiana Jones and Lara Croftare in a race to retrieve it. His other works include A Bear for Felicia (Puffin), Mowgli and the Bear (Disney) and When Crows are White (Scholastic).
Sachin Kundalkar is National Award-winning film maker with twelve Indian feature films to his credit, a screen writer whose work has been adapted into multiple Indian languages including Hindi and Malayalam. He is the author of the celebrated novel ‘Cobalt Blue’ which he wrote in Marathi when he was twenty-three years old. The novel by now has been translated into English, Hindi, Kannada, and Sinhala and has been adapted into a visually stunning feature film.
Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan was an Indian poet and scholar of Indian literature and Linguistics. Ramanujan was also a professor of Linguistics at University of Chicago, a poet, scholar, Linguist, philologist, folklorist, translator, and playwright. He was posthumously awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1999.
Born in 1948 to a Brahmin father and a Shia Muslim mother, Mahesh Bhatt, in a career spanning almost four decades, has rewritten several rules and thereafter broken most of them. He began his journey in the film industry with Manzilein Aur Bhi Hain in 1973. He then broke new ground with Arth which received critical and commercial acclaim. He followed Arth with Saransh, Janam, Daddy, Sir, Tamanna and, finally, the National Award-winning Zakhm. Today he does not direct films but is still involved in the film industry and has written screenplays for movies such as Raaz, Jism, Murder, Zeher, Kalyug and Gangster. He has also directed several documentaries and has anchored and hosted for Sahara Television Haqueeqat, a show on human right violations, as well as Imaging Science, a show telecast on Doordarshan.
Mahesh Bhatt wrote U.G. Krishnamurti: A Life which has been translated into several languages. He contributes regularly to newspapers of national circulation in English (Times of India, Indian Express, Hindustan Times, Pioneer, The Hindu and others) as well as in Hindi (Dainik Jagran and Dainik Bhaskar). He also compiled, edited and wrote the foreword for a book of quotations of U.G. Krishnamurti called The Little Book of Questions.
Anushka Ravishankar, often called the Indian Dr Suess, has been a pioneer in writing both nonsense in contemporary English in India and also picture books. Some of the earliest Indian picture books to be published internationally and win international awards were by her, such as Tiger on a Tree, Catch that Crocodile and Elephants Never Forget. She has gone on to collaborate with many international illustrators to create some extraordinary picture books.
More recently, her chapter books have also been much loved, such as Moin and the Monster and the Zain and Ana series. She is also the co-founder of the much acclaimed indie publishing house, Duckbill.
The blend of humour, realism and nonsense in Anushka’s writing, as well as the charm of the characters she creates has won her many fans in India and internationally.
Nick Cave has been writing and performing music for more than forty years and is best known as the songwriter and lead singer of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, with whom he has recorded seventeen studio albums. The band have been documented in two feature films: the BAFTA- and Sundance-winning 20,000 Days on Earth (2014) and the Grammy nominated One More Time With Feeling (2016). Nick Cave’s novels And the Ass Saw the Angel (1990), The Death of Bunny Munro (2009) and The Sick Bag Song (2015) are international bestsellers, and he is an acclaimed film score composer and screenplay writer. Born in Australia in 1957, Cave now lives in England.
Rahul Pandita is a journalist and an author based in Delhi. He is a 2015 Yale World Fellow. He has also authored The Lover Boy of Bahawalpur: How the Pulwama Case was Cracked, Hello, Bastar: The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement and co-authored The Absent State. He has extensively reported from war zones, including Iraq and Sri Lanka. In 2010, he was awarded the International Red Cross Award for conflict reporting.
Rahul is also the co-writer of Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s 2020 film, Shikara.
Raja Sen is one of India’s most widely read film critics, writing for Rediff, NDTV, Mint Lounge and various national and international publications. He has become known for his savage honesty. Those who read him, therefore, believe he’s the last person who should write a children’s book. Those who know him have been waiting. This is his first book.
He lives in Bombay with his wife and his action figures.
Once upon a time, Vishal K. Bharadwaj was a three-year-old who invented fanciful creatures to draw on his home’s walls, with his parents’ blessing. This dangerous precedent led to an adulthood doing much the same, in the fields of design, illustration, animation and (most recently) developing and baking cake recipes. It has been an eventful life of making, and life is what you make of it. Sometimes it starts by drawing on walls.
