Archives: Authors

Premchand is one of the greatest Hindi and Urdu authors in India. His name was originally Dhanpat Rai, but he came to be better-known by the name of Nawab Rai and Munshi Premchand. He was a sympathetic author, a conscious citizen of the country, a skilled orator and well-read editor. Premchand developed a tradition of Hindi story and novel so influential that it became the guide for the literature produced across the span of the century.

Jhumpa Lahiri, a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College (Columbia University). She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection. She is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth and The Lowland, which was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award in fiction. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina and Racconti romani. She has translated three novels by Domenico Starnone and is the editor of The Penguin Classics Book of Italian Short Stories, which was published in Italy as Racconti Italiani. Lahiri received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 she was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent book in English is a collection of essays entitled Translating Myself and Others, published in Spring 2022 by Princeton University Press.

SHASHI THAROOR is the bestselling author of twenty books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a noted critic and columnist. His books include the pathbreaking satire The Great Indian Novel (1989), the classic India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), the bestselling An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, for which he won the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, 2016, for Books (Non-Fiction), and The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and His India. He has been Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and Minister of State for Human Resource Development and Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. He is a three-time member of the Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram and chairs the Parliament Information
Technology committee. He has won numerous literary awards, including a national Sahitya Akademi award, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award. He was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India’s highest honour for overseas Indians, in 2004, and honoured as New Age Politician of the Year (2010) by NDTV.

Upamanyu Chatterjee was born in 1959 and joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1983. His published works include a few short stories and three novels – English August: An Indian Story (1988), The Last Burden ( 1993) and The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award for writing in English. Upamanyu Chatterjee is married and has two daughters.

Palagummi Sainath is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist. He took an M.A. in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and joined the United News of India in 1980. Later he became foreign editor of The Daily and deputy chief editor of the weekly Blitz in Mumbai. In early 1993 he left Blitz to work full-time on rural poverty, after winning a Times of India fellowship that enabled him to pursue the subject. His work in that area won him a further twelve awards and fellowships over the next two years, including the prestigious European Commission’s journalism award, the Lorenzo Natali Prize.
Sainath has been a visiting lecturer in journalism, development and politics at universities in India, Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia. He has been directly involved in training journalists and has also been on the faculty of the Social Communications Media department of the Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai, for the past ten years. A regular contributor to The Telegraph in Calcutta, he also writes for the fortnightly Frontline and the daily Business Line in Madras.

Palagummi Sainath is founder-editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). He has been a journalist and reporter for 42 years, covering rural India full time for thirty of those. With an MA in History from JNU, Sainath joined the United News of India in 1980. In 1982, he became foreign editor of The Daily and deputy chief editor of the weekly Blitz in Mumbai. In 1993, he left Blitz to work full-time on reporting rural poverty. He was rural affairs editor of The Hindu from 2004 to 2014.
Sainath has won over 60 national and international reporting awards and fellowships. These include the Fukuoka Grand Prize 2021, the World Media Summit award 2014, the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2007, Amnesty International’s Global Human Rights Reporting Prize and the Ramnath Goenka Journalist of the Year award. He has been teaching journalism at the Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai, for three decades, and also at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, since 2000. He was McGraw Professor of Writing in Princeton in 2012.
In December 2014, Sainath launched PARI. Publishing in 14 languages, PARI is an independent multimedia digital platform, whose reporting mandate is to cover every region and section of rural people. In seven years, PARI has won over 50 journalism awards.
Sainath lives in Mumbai.

Natarajan Chandrasekaran is chairman of the Board of Tata Sons, the holding company and promoter of more than 100 Tata operating companies. Prior to this he was the chief executive officer of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading global IT services provider and one of India’s most valuable companies. He is also a director on the Board of the Reserve Bank of India.

Chandrasekaran is chairman of the Indian Institute of Management Lucknow and president of the Court at the Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru. He has been awarded several honorary doctorates by leading universities in India and internationally.

Roopa Purushothaman is the chief economist and head of policy advocacy at the Tata Group, and the founder of Avasara Leadership Institute. A co-author of the path-breaking 2003 Goldman Sachs report, Dreaming with BRICS: The Path to 2050, she has contributed to a number of publications on globalization and development.

Roopa is a graduate of Yale University and the London School of Economics, and has served on the prime minister of India’s advisory council on urban infrastructure.

Ruchir Sharma is chairman of Rockefeller International and founder of Breakout Capital, a global investment firm. He moved to Rockefeller in 2022 after 25 years at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, where he was head of emerging markets and chief global strategist. Based in New York, he is a columnist at the Financial Times and a former contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. He is the author of four books, including the international bestseller Breakout Nations and the New York Times bestseller The Rise and Fall of Nations.

Sanjeev Sanyal is the principal economic adviser to the Government of India and an internationally acclaimed economist and urban theorist. He lives in New Delhi and writes on a wide array of topics, ranging from economics to history. A Rhodes Scholar and an Eisenhower Fellow, Sanjeev spent two decades working in international financial markets and was named Young Global Leader in 2010 by the World Economic Forum. He is the author of the bestselling books The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History (2016), Land of the Seven Rivers: A Brief History of India’s Geography (2012) and The Indian Renaissance: India’s Rise After a Thousand Years of Decline (2008), published by Penguin. This book is an adaptation of the second.

Sowmya Rajendran has written several books for children, from picture books for toddlers to young adult fiction. She won the Sahitya Akademi’s Bal Sahitya Puraskar in 2015 for her children’s novel Mayil Will Not Be Quiet, co-authored with Niveditha Subramaniam. Sowmya works as a journalist for a news publication and writes on gender, culture and cinema. She lives in Pune.