Archives: Authors

Amneh Shaikh-Farooqui is the founder and official storyteller for her social enterprise, ‘polly & other stories’, and a founding curatorial member for the Women of the World Festival (WOW) in Pakistan. She is passionate about women’s empowerment, visibility, inclusion and really good cheese. Amneh lives like a lyric from ‘Manic Monday’ and chugs along like The Little Engine That Could, which gets her through the day.

Amjad Ali Khan is one of the undisputed masters of the music world. Born to sarod maestro Haafiz Ali Khan, he gave his first performance at the age of six, and is credited with reinventing the technique of playing the sarod. Over the course of a distinguished career spanning more than six decades, Amjad Ali Khan has won numerous accolades including a Grammy nomination, the Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum, the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award and all three Padma Awards. He has performed at venues the world over including Carnegie Hall and the Royal Albert Hall, as well as at the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize Concert in 2014 in Oslo, Norway. Samaagam, his first sarod concerto, has been performed by the Britten Sinfonia, Orchestre National d’lle de France, Orchestre d’Auvergne, London Philharmonia, Gulbenkian Orchestra, Welsh National Opera and Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Amjad Ali Khan has also been a visiting professor at Stanford University, University of New Mexico and Jacob’s School of Music.

Mohini Rao is an English-language writer and editor. She has written several excellent books. The inspirational literature she has penned is widely celebrated. She also works as a philanthropist and has received many awards.

Alyque Padamsee Alyque Padamsee (1931-2018) was director of the Theatre Group of Bombay and chief executive of Lintas India. Considered the guru of English theatre in India, he had over seventy-six major productions to his name, including Broken Images, Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar. Informally known as ‘God’ in advertising circles, he successfully launched and built over a hundred brands. Padamsee was communications adviser to Chandrababu Naidu, the former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, where he supervized the presentation to the US President Bill Clinton and to the British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He was given the Lifetime Achievement Award for Theatre by the Sangeet Natak Akademi and was a recipient of the Padma Shri. He is the only Indian to have been voted into the International Clio Hall of Fame, the Oscars of world advertising.
He is the author of A Double Life, his memoirs in theatre and advertising, published by Penguin.

SHAHANA RAZA is Saeeda Bano’s grand-daughter. She has a Master’s in Film and Viedo Production and has worked in television, radio and other print media. A liberal feminist, Shahana is an independent writer and video producer, a wannabe vegan and a dilettante environmentalist. She currently lives in Dubai with her husband and two children.

Taslima Nasrin is an award-winning Bangladeshi writer and human rights activist, and has been living in exile since 1994.

Maharghya Chakraborty is a PhD scholar at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.

V.N. DATTA (1926-2020), a distinguished historian born in Amritsar, was emeritus professor of modern history, Kurukshetra University, former general president of the Indian History Congress, resident fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and visiting professor at a number of universities, including Moscow, Leningrad and Berlin. Among his much acclaimed publications are Amritsar Past and Present (1967); Jallianwala Bagh (1969), which was translated into Hindi and Punjabi; New Light on the Punjab Disturbances in 1919, Vols I and II (1975); Madan Lal
Dhingra and the Revolutionary Movement (1978); Gandhi and Bhagat Singh (2008), which was translated into Tamil; Sati: A Historical, Social and Philosophical Enquiry into the Hindu Rite of Widow-Burning (1988); Maulana Azad (1990); Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Sarmad (2007); and The Tribune, 130 Years: A Witness to History (2011). He regularly contributed to academic journals and popular press; his column ‘Off the Shelf’ in the Tribune won him great accolades. He was writing a book on Gandhi and Sarala Devi Chaudhurani in his last days.

NONICA DATTA teaches history at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She received her PhD from Cambridge University, UK. Previously, she taught at Miranda House, University of Delhi. She has been a fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi and a visiting professor at the universities of St Gallen, Toronto and Humboldt. Her publications include Forming an Identity: A Social History of the Jats (1999); and Violence, Martyrdom and Partition: A Daughter’s Testimony (2009), which was shortlisted for the Crossword Award.

Jeet Thayil was born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala. As a boy he travelled through much of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia with his father, TJS George, a writer and editor. He worked as a journalist for twenty-one years, in Bombay, Bangalore, Hong Kong and New York City. In 2005 he began to write fiction. The first instalment of his Bombay Trilogy, Narcopolis, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and became an unlikely bestseller. His book of poems These Errors Are Correct won the Sahitya Akademi Award (India’s National Academy of Letters), and his musical collaborations include the opera Babur in London. His essays, poetry and short fiction have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Granta, TLS, Esquire, The London Magazine, The Guardian and Alexander, among other venues. His most recent novel is Names of the Women. He is the editor of The Penguin Book of Indian Poets.

The ‘Dear Me’ series of letters first appeared in Hindustan Times in 2017. These columns, penned by India’s top sporting icons, were published with the intent to inspire a young generation of struggling sportspersons, to serve as the light at the end of the tunnel for them.

Praveen Singh Rajput was a student leader during his Graduation. He is a graduate in Political Science from Allahabad University, where one half of the crowd wanted to see him become an IAS and the rest wanted him to become an MLA. But instead, he paved his own path and topped the entrance exam for Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Bangalore to study MBA. Apart from being an author, Praveen has also founded a successful e-commerce and retail chain, Frinza.com