Archives: Authors

Samra Zafar is an award-winning international speaker, bestselling author, and social entrepreneur who advocates for equity, inclusion, and human rights.
After escaping a decade of abuse living as a child bride in Canada, she pursued her education as a single mother working multiple jobs. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from the University of Toronto with the highest distinction, winning over a dozen awards and scholarships. She then began a successful corporate career in finance.
While graduating from University of Toronto, Samra began to share her personal story in order to raise awareness about intimate partner abuse and in the hopes of empowering women to pursue their dreams and independence. Her work has since been featured in hundreds of interviews and articles in both the Canadian and the international media. Her speaking portfolio includes three TED Talks, and speeches to UNICEF, Yale University, Art of Leadership, and many leading non-profits, corporations and universities across the world. She is one of the youngest alumni to serve as a governor for the University of Toronto, and is a Celebrated Ambassador for Plan International campaign to end child marriage. She has been named one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women (2019), and has also received a 2019 Top Twenty-five Canadian Immigrants Award.
Samra lives in Toronto with her two daughters and is an avid traveller.

Samra Zafar is an award-winning international speaker, bestselling author, and social entrepreneur who advocates for equity, inclusion, and human rights.

After escaping a decade of abuse living as a child bride in Canada, she pursued her education as a single mother working multiple jobs. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from the University of Toronto with the highest distinction, winning over a dozen awards and scholarships. She then began a successful corporate career in finance.

While graduating from University of Toronto, Samra began to share her personal story in order to raise awareness about intimate partner abuse and in the hopes of empowering women to pursue their dreams and independence. Her work has since been featured in hundreds of interviews and articles in both the Canadian and the international media. Her speaking portfolio includes three TED Talks, and speeches to UNICEF, Yale University, Art of Leadership, and many leading non-profits, corporations and universities across the world. She is one of the youngest alumni to serve as a governor for the University of Toronto, and is a Celebrated Ambassador for Plan International campaign to end child marriage. She has been named one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women (2019), and has also received a 2019 Top Twenty-five Canadian Immigrants Award.

Samra lives in Toronto with her two daughters and is an avid traveller.

Norman Lewis, an English professor at Rio Hondo College in Whittier, California, is the author of more than twenty-five books on reading, spelling, grammar, and vocabulary, including the bestselling Word Power Made Easy, Instant Word Power and Thirty Days to Better English (all three available in Penguin), and the classic Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary (with Wilfred Funk) and How to Read Better & Faster.

Deepa Agarwal is the author of more than 60 books for children and adults. She has received many prestigious awards and her work has been translated into several Indian and foreign languages. A large number of her short stories and poems have been included in textbooks. Her work spans different genres and she has also curated several anthologies. Caravan to Tibet, The Arthashastra for Children and The Begum are among her notable titles. Deepa lives in Delhi with her husband.

Chandan Deshmukh, a TEDx speaker, is a thirty-one-year-old Bengaluru-based Electronics and Communication Engineer by chance and an SAP Basis engineer by profession. Chandan’s constant public embarrassments in parent-teacher meetings and never-ending self-doubts in his career led him to research hacks and best practices that everyone can easily apply in their daily life. His first love is theatre and during his childhood, he acted in a Kannada movie and a TV serial. He draws cartoons about the subtle humour of being awkward on awkwardpage.com. And when he is not scaring his family with weird philosophies, he is likely to be swimming, travelling or bungee jumping.

Sameer Arshad Khatlani is a journalist with Hindustan Times. He was a senior assistant editor with the Indian Express until June 2018. Born and raised in Kashmir, Khatlani began his career with the now-defunct Bengaluru-based Vijay Times in 2005 as its national affairs correspondent. He joined the Times of India in 2007. Over the next nine years, he was part of the newspaper’s national and international news-gathering team. Khatlani has reported from Iraq and Pakistan, and covered elections and national disasters. He has a master’s degree in history from Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi and is a fellow with the Hawaii-based American East-West Center, which was established by the United States Congress in 1960 to promote better relations with Asian and Pacific countries.

Deepa Anappara’s debut novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Guardian, and NPR. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Indian Literature, and included in Time’s 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time. It has been translated into over twenty languages. Anappara is the co-editor of Letters to a Writer of Color, a collection of personal essays on fiction, race, and culture.

Jahnavi Barua is a writer based in Bengaluru. Her first book, Next Door, a collection of short fiction, was publushed by Penguin India in 2008 to wide critical acclaim. The second, a novel, Rebirth, was published in 2010 and shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize. Undertow is her third book. She was awarded the Charles Wallace Trust fellowship for creative writing in 2006. Her books are on the syllabi of many universities and her short fiction has been widely anthologized.
Undertow has won the AutHer Award and the Kalinga Award, and has been longlisted for the JCB Prize as well as the BLF Atta Galatta Prize.

Sara Naveed is the author of Our Story Ends Here. After spending her early years in Sharjah, UAE, she returned to Pakistan to resume her studies. She completed a degree in banking and finance, and now works at a software firm as the content head. She resides with her family in Lahore.
You can follow Sara on Twitter (@SaraNaveed) and Instagram (@sara_naveed), or get in touch with her through her Facebook page (www.facebook.com/saranaveedwriter).

Nammalvar was a ninth-century mystic poet, a Vishnu devotee, who descended from a long line of Vaishnavas. He is considered the greatest of the alvar poet-saints of the Tamil Srivaisnava tradition.