Archives: Authors

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.

Melanie Silgardo was born and educated in Bombay. She has published two books of poetry and was a founder-member of a poetry publishing house, Newground, also in Bombay. She has worked in publishing, both in India and in the UK, where she worked with Virago Press for many years. She has
edited anthologies of poetry and short fiction. Melanie lives in London.

Eunice de Souza (1940-2016) was born in Pune where she grew up. She graduated from Bombay’s Sophia College, University of Bombay, did her postgraduate work at Marquette University, Wisconsin, and years later obtained a doctorate for her thesis on Indian poetry and criticism from the University of Bombay. She taught English literature at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and was head of the department till she retired. There she distinguished herself as an inspirational teacher influencing generations of students. She was a scholar of illuminating research into poetry written in English in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was the anthologist of several works of prose and poetry, the last These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry (2012) co-edited with Melanie Silgardo.

She was the author of several books of poems. Her first — the groundbreaking Fix was published in 1979, followed by Women in Dutch Painting (1988), Ways of Belonging (1990) and Learn from the Almond Leaf (2016). She also wrote two novels—Dangerlok (2001) and Dev and Simran (2003) as well as several books for children.

In the last several years of her life she brought all the weight of her knowledge and her passion for literature to her much-loved weekly Mumbai Mirror cultural column which she wrote right to the end.