HLF Online
HLF Online Profiles
A Giridhar Rao
A. Giridhar Rao is interested in questions of linguistic justice. What are just and equitable language policies for a multilingual country like India? How can our schools use India’s astonishing linguistic diversity more effectively? At Azim Premji University, his courses on language and literature pedagogy ask these questions. He blogs in English on these questions at bolii.blogspot.com. Questions of communicative justice drew Giridhar to the planned language Esperanto. He has translated the writings of Gandhi, Manto, and Faiz into Esperanto. He is a member of the Academy of Esperanto. He blogs in Esperanto at lingvovivo.blogspot.com.
Abhijeet Kulkarni
Abhijeet Kulkarni has been a sports journalist with the Press Trust of India (PTI), Hindustan Times, Mumbai Mirror and scroll.in. He was also associated with the sports NGO Lakshya, which worked at identifying and nurturing talent in Olympic sports.
Adhiraj Parthasarathy
Adhiraj Parthasarathy is the author of Aah-o- Fughan aur bhi hain, a book about his experiences as a member of a team involved in collecting socio economic data in the states of Sikkim, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh for India’s first caste census after Independence. His book vividly describes encounters with government bureaucracy, individuals and non-state actors intent on subverting the caste census for their own political ends. It also talks about the challenges of data collection and the authenticity and reliability of statistical information in India, with a focus on socio-economic and caste information. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago.
Year: 2018
Advaita Kala
Advaita Kala is a best-selling novelist (Almost Single, 2007), screenwriter (Kahaani, 2012; Anjaana Anjaani, 2010), and a Contributing Editor to India Ahead. She has also written a TV show for prime-time television, and numerous columns in leading publications. Her film and literary work has focussed on themes of female empowerment and experience.
Afsar Mohammad
Afsar Mohammad is a well-known Telugu poet and literary critic. He currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is Evening with a Sufi (2022). The poem presented is translated into English by Jamal Jones. (Pre-recorded video).
Year: 2022
Aloka Parasher-Sen
Aloka Parasher-Sen completed her education with a Ph.D. (1978) from the SOAS, University of London. She has taught History at the University of Hyderabad since 1979 and for short durations at the University of California (1992), Berkeley, the Sudasien Institut, Universitat Heidelberg (2007) and the University of Alberta (2008-2011). Her major publications are in the social history of the excluded castes and the history and archaeology of the Deccan.
Anant Maringanti
Anant Maringanti is the director of Hyderabad Urban Lab, a multi-disciplinary urban research centre based in Hyderabad. He is a geographer with a PhD from the University of Minnesota and has taught at several universities in India. He spends most of his time thinking about, teaching about, writing about cities and urbanisation in South Asia.
Year: 2019
Aniruddha Bahal
Aniruddha Bahal is the founder and editor-in-chief of Cobrapost.com, an Indian news and views website and television production house. Previously, he worked for India Today, Down to Earth, Financial Express, and Outlook, among other publications. He also co-founded Tehelka.com in 2000. Bahal’s publications include the novels A Crack in the Mirror (1991), Bunker 13 (2003) and The Emissary (2010).
Year: 2014-15
Anirudh Kanisetti
Anirudh Kanisetti is the author of Lords of the Deccan, a new history of medieval South India. Holding a first-class honours degree from BITS Pilani, he is currently an Editor at the Museum of Art and Photography. He has received grants from the Princeton Center for Digital Humanities and the India Foundation for the Arts, and his writings and work have been featured in The Hindu, The New Indian Express, LiveMint and ThePrint, among others. He writes the fortnightly Thinking Medieval column for ThePrint and hosts two critically acclaimed podcasts – Echoes of India and Yuddha.
Anju Makhija
Anju Makhija is a Sahitya Akademi Award-winning poet, playwright, and translator. She has published poetry volumes View from the Web (1995), Pickling Season (2012), Changing, Unchanging: New and Selected Poems (1995-2023); a collection of plays Mumbai Traps (2022); and co-translated Freedom and Fissures (1998), Seeking the Beloved: The Mystical Verse of Shah Abdul Latif (2005). She has won several awards including the Sahitya Akademi English Translation Prize, The All India Poetry Competition, the BBC World Regional Poetry Prize, and the Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship. She was on the Sahitya Akademi’s English Advisory Board and is the co-founder of the Pondicherry/Auroville Poetry Festival. Years: 2025, 2021.
Ashish Khetan
Ashish Khetan is one of India’s best-known investigative journalists and a lawyer. In a fifteen-year career as a journalist, he broke several important news stories and wrote over 2,000 investigative and explanatory articles. In 2014, he ran for parliament from the New Delhi constituency. Between 2015 and 2018, he headed the top think tank of the Delhi government. He now practises law in Mumbai.
Badri Narayan
Badri Narayan is a Hindi poet, and a social scientist specializing in social history and cultural anthropology. His poetry collection Tumdi ke Shabd received the Sahitya Akademi Award for 2022. His other poetry collections include Pratinidhi Kavitaye, Khudai Mein Himsa, Shabpadiyam, and Sach Sune Kai Din Huye. His poems have been translated into several languages including English, Bangla, Odia, Malayalam, and Urdu. He is a recipient of Bharat Bhushan Samman, Banarasi Prasad Bhojpuri Samman, Kedar Samman, Spandan Kirti Award, Rashtrakavi Dinkar Award, Shamsher Samman, and Meera Smriti Samman. His political analyses are published regularly in Hindustan, Amar Ujala, Dainik Jagran, Indian Express, The Hindu, India Today, and Outlook.
Claire Chambers
Claire Chambers is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York, UK where she researches and teaches writing from South Asia and the Perso-Arab world. She edited Desi Delicacies: Food Writing from Muslim South Asia (2021) and the monograph Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels (2019). She is the co-editor of Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia (2023).
Coomi Kapoor
Coomi Kapoor is a pioneer political journalist who was the first woman chief reporter and female bureau chief in Delhi. She has been in the profession for nearly five decades and has worked with The Indian Express, India Today, The Sunday Mail, The Indian Post, The Illustrated Weekly of India and The Motherland. She is presently consulting editor at The Indian Express, where her popular column, ‘Inside Track’, appears on Sundays. Her earlier book, The Emergency: A Personal History (2015) was a bestseller.
Esther David
Esther David is an Indian Jewish author and illustrator belonging to the Bene Israel Jewish community of Ahmedabad. Her novels include The Walled City (1997), The Book of Esther (2002), and The Book of Rachel (2006) which received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2010. She has received the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Award, USA, for the study of Indian Jewish cuisine.
G V Ramanjaneyulu
G. V. Ramanjaneyulu is an Agricultural Scientist with a specialization in agroecology, organic/natural farming, agribusiness management, and public policy. He designs community-managed extensions, enterprises, and programmes, and pioneers innovations in organic/natural farming practices, and institutional systems. He holds a PhD in Agriculture from Indian Agricultural Research Institute. He is currently the Executive Director, Centre for Sustainable Agriculture and has in the past worked with the Indian Revenue Service (IRS) and the Agricultural Research Service (ARS).
Gita Ramaswamy
Gita Ramaswamy is the Trustee of the Hyderabad Book Trust and an author. Since 1980, HBT has published over 400 books written in or translated into Telugu. Her own publications include Land Guns Caste Woman: The Memoirs of a Lapsed Revolutionary (2022), India Stinking (2005), and Jeena Hai To Marna Seekho: The Life and Times of George Reddy (2014). She is the co-author of Taking Charge of Our Bodies (2004), On Their Own (2005), The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing (2016), and translator of Here I Am (stories by P Sathyavathi, 2019), Prison Notes (stories by B Anuradha, 2021), and Life in Anantharam (autobiography of Devulapalli Krishnamurthi, 2016).
Speaker @ HLF 2023
Gurjit Singh
Ambassador Gurjit Singh is a former Indian diplomat with 37 years of experience. He has been the Ambassador of India to Germany, Indonesia, ASEAN, Ethiopia, and the African Union besides having been in Japan, Sri Lanka, Kenya, and Italy on assignment. He has authored five books the latest of which is The Harambee Factor: India-Africa Economic and Development Partnership. He is an Honorary Professor of Humanities at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indore. He Chairs the CII business Task Force on Trilateral Cooperation in Africa.
H S Panag
A veteran of the 1971 Indo-Pak war, Lt Gen HS Panag, PVSM, AVSM (Retd) was General Officer Commanding-in-Chief (GOC-in-C) of Northern Command and Central Command. In his illustrious career spanning forty years, he not only held many prestigious instruction, staff and command appointments, but also served extensively in operational and counter-insurgency areas. He is credited for having initiated major doctrinal reforms in the Indian Army including the conceptualization of employment of Mechanized Forces in high-altitude. After retirement, he served as a Member of the Armed Forces Tribunal with the status of a High Court judge.
Harimohan Paruvu
Harimohan Paruvu is a first class cricketer, writer, speaker and workshop facilitator based out of Hyderabad. His first novel The Men Within: A Cricketing Tale has been made into a Telugu movie Golconda High School. His other books include If You Love Someone…, a novel, and two non-fiction books, 50 Not Out: 50 Lessons from Cricket and This Way Is Easier Dad. As a newspaper columnist he has written for the New Indian Express, HANS India, The Hindu, Deccan Chronicle among others. He represented Hyderabad in the Ranji Trophy (1985-87) and is currently the Chairman of the Senior Selection Committee for the Hyderabad Cricket Association.
Harsh Shah
Harsh Shah is an MBA candidate at Harvard Business School in the United States. He completed his BA from University of California, Berkeley, where he studied economics and public policy, and co-founded the Berkeley Research for Contemporary India Program (BRCIP). His writing has appeared in The Indian Express, The Print, The Hindu, Hindustan Times, The Economic Times, and India Today.
Ira Raja
Ira Raja is a professor of English at the University of Delhi. Her primary research interests are postcolonial literature and ageing studies. She co-edited The Table is Laid: The Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing (2007), a pioneering collection of literary and non-literary texts on food in English and Indian languages. She is part of the Global Editorial Collective of the journal Postcolonial Studies and co-editor, Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology.
Ishrat Syed
Surgeons Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed write together as Kalpish Ratna. They explore the interface between science and the humanities. Their recent books are Synapse (2019), Fat: The Body, Food and Obesity (2018), The Secret Life of Zika Virus (2017), and Room 000: Narratives of the Bombay Plague (2015). Kalpana Swaminathan is also the creator of detective Lalli who has so far appeared in six novels, the most recent being Greenlight (2017). Her book of short stories, Venus Crossing, won the Crossword Fiction Award for 2009.
Josy Joseph
Josy Joseph is the author of A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India. An award-winning investigative journalist, his exposés include the Adarsh Apartment scam, naval war room leak case, and scandals such as the conduct of the Commonwealth Games, and the 2G Spectrum allocation scam. The Ramnath Goenka Foundation awarded him the Journalist of the Year in print media (2013), and the Prem Bhatia Trust elected him India’s best political reporter (2010). He holds a master’s in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and is presently the national security editor of The Hindu.
Year: 2017
K Srilata
Srilata K is a poet, fiction writer, translator, and academic. Her latest collection of poems is Three Women in a Single-Room House (2023). Her other publications include five collections of poetry, a book about the disability experience This Kind of Child: The `Disability’ Story (2022), a novel Table for Four (2011, and edited anthologies The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry (2009), Short Fiction from South India (2008). Her poems feature in The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets and The Penguin Book of Indian Poets. Formerly a Professor of Literature at IIT Madras, she is currently Adjunct Professor at the Chennai Mathematical Institute.
K Usha Rani
K Usha Rani currently works as a translator after having pursued a career in banking for most of her life. She worked as an editor for five years with Prajasakti Publications. She has two other translations scheduled to be published by Prajasakti Book House. Her interest in preserving cultural harmony and the democratic rights of the people is what motivates her to work on the translations like Aamir’s Framed as a Terrorist.
Kabir Bedi
Kabir Bedi’s credits include starring with Michael Caine in Ashanti and Roddy McDowell in Thief of Baghdad, and playing the title role in the Italian film The Black Pirate (Il Corsaro Nero). On American television, he has acted in Highlander, Murder She Wrote, Magnum, P.I., Dynasty and many HBO mini-series. On stage, he starred in John Murrell’s Taj at the Luminato Festival in Canada, and M.M. Kaye’s Far Pavilions in London’s West End. In India, he has done close to seventy Bollywood films.
Kalpana Kannabiran
Kalpana Kannabiran is a sociologist and legal scholar. She has published widely in the field of interdisciplinary law, sociology, and gender studies. Recipient of the Amartya Sen Award for Distinguished Social Scientists (2012) for her writing in the field of law, she is a Distinguished Professor at the Council for Social Development, New Delhi.
Year: 2014-15, 2023
Kalpana Swaminathan
Surgeons Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed write together as Kalpish Ratna. They explore the interface between science and the humanities. Their recent books are Synapse (2019), Fat: The Body, Food and Obesity (2018), The Secret Life of Zika Virus (2017), and Room 000: Narratives of the Bombay Plague (2015). Kalpana Swaminathan is also the creator of detective Lalli who has so far appeared in six novels, the most recent being Greenlight (2017). Her book of short stories, Venus Crossing, won the Crossword Fiction Award for 2009.
Kamalakar Pasupuleti
Kamalakar Pasupuleti is a theoretical physicist who hails from an old Hyderabadi family. He served the Defence Research & Development Laboratory, Hyderabad in many capacities. For many years now, he has been running a popular blog (kamalp.blogspot.com) putting together his first-hand memories of the sights, sounds, and smells of the Hyderabad of his childhood. He has also been diligently collecting and posting information on the courtesans, singers, musicians, poets, actors and directors who sprung from or made the city their home, the fine days of Deccan Radio, and the film-going culture of its citizens, and Hyderabad’s contribution to Indian cinema. Much of this material was brought out in the book Music and Arts in Hyderabad Deccan (2017). He has since published two more books: The Lost Treasure: Early Hindustani Talkies (2018) and Arrival of British & Hollywood movies in Nizam's Dominions (2020). He now lives in the U.S.
Kanika Dang
Kanika Dang is a graduate of National School of Drama who has made her mark in the field of theatre, films, TV serials, commercials. She has worked with theatre stalwarts like Mr. Satyadev Dubey & movie moguls like Yashraj. Kanika has worked in British, Dutch & German projects and is also a producer of plays & short films.
Kaveree Bamzai
Kaveree Bamzai is an independent journalist with over thirty years at India Today, The Indian Express, and The Times of India. She was the first, and is so far the only, woman editor of India Today. A member of the CII Women Empowerment Committee for several years, she is now a member of the jury for the Women Exemplar Awards of the CII and of the ISC-FICCI Sanitation Awards. She is a changemaker for ‘Save The Children’ charity and a mentor for the KARM Fellowship. The Three Khans: and the Emergence of New India (2021) is her latest publication.
Year: 2022
Kishwar Desai
Kishwar Desai is an award-winning author of both fiction and non-fiction. Her novel Witness the Night (2010) won the Costa First Novel Award, in the UK, and was followed by two others: Origins of Love (2012) and Sea of Innocence (2013). The trilogy has since been optioned for a web series. Her non-fiction books include Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt (2007) and Jallianwala Bagh: The Real Story (2018). Her play Manto! won the TAG Omega award for Best Play in 1999. The Longest Kiss: The Life and Times of Devika Rani (2020) is her latest publication.
Year: 2021
Konkona Sen Sharma
Konkona Sen Sharma is the poster girl of Indie cinema and is one of the most respected actresses in the country. She is also a writer and director and has appeared in over 50 films winning 2 National Awards and 4 Filmfare awards amongst several others. In 2016, she wrote and directed A Death in the Gunj which premiered at Toronto International Film Festival. The film won several awards. Her recent releases include Dolly Kitty Aur Chamakte Sitare directed by Alankrita Srivastava, Drishyam Films' Ram Prasad Ki Tehrvi directed by Seema Pahwa, and Dharma's film Ajeeb Daastan-Geeli Pucchi directed by Neeraj Ghaywan on Netflix.
M Rajshekar
Aniruddha Bahal is the founder and editor-in-chief of Cobrapost.com, an investigative, non-profit website. He also co-founded Tehelka.com. He worked for India Today, Down to Earth, Financial Express and Outlook, among other publications. He is also the author of two novels, Bunker 13 (2003) and The Emissary (2010), and a comic, The Adventures of Rhea: The Cobrapost Affair (2015).
Mahuya Bandyopadhyay
Mahuya Bandyopadhyay is a social anthropologist, studying varied manifestations and experiences of the carceral mesh in contemporary urban society. Her work is situated at the intersections of the sociology of organisations, sociology of law, crime and punishment and gender and masculinities. She teaches at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
Manjari Katju
Manjari Katju is a professor of Political Science at the University of Hyderabad, and author of Electoral Practice and the Election Commission of India: Politics, Institutions and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Hinduising Democracy: The Vishva Hindu Parishad in Contemporary India (New Text, 2017), and, Vishva Hindu Parishad and Indian Politics (Orient Longman/Blackswan, 2003/2010). She was the recipient of the Dr. D.C. Pavate Fellowship in 2001 to research at the Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge, UK. She also received the ICSSR Senior Research Fellowship in 2016 to study the functioning of the electoral administration of India.
Meghnad Desai
Meghnad Desai was associated for 38 years with the London School of Economics (LSE) where he was Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance. He retired as Emeritus Professor of Economics and was made Honorary Fellow of the LSE. He joined the British Labour Party in 1971 and was elevated to the House of Lords in June 1991. He was Chairman of the Gandhi Memorial Statue Trust which helped erect the statue of Mahatma Gandhi in London’s Parliament Square. He was raised to the peerage as Baron Desai in 1991, received the Pravasi Bharatiya Puraskar in 2004 and the Padma Bhushan in 2008.
Michiel Baas
Michiel Baas has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Amsterdam, and has held various academic positions with the National University of Singapore, Nalanda University (Rajgir), the International Institute for Asian Studies (Leiden) and the University of Amsterdam. Most of his work centres on the Indian middle class. He has published extensively on the topic of fitness and bodybuilding in India; Indian student-migration to Australia; the migration trajectories of skilled professionals in Singapore; the Indian migration industry; and the lives and lifestyles of IT professionals in Bangalore.
Mohammed Aamir Khan
Mohammad Aamir Khan who recalls his experiences as a victim of the false terrorism charges in his book, has constantly raised his voice for democratic values and communal harmony after being released. He has been supporting the cause of minority communities, prisoners, depressed women and LGBT.
Nancy Adajania
Nancy Adajania is a Bombay-based cultural theorist and curator. She has curated a number of major research-based exhibitions including the Nelly Sethna retrospective, ‘The Unpaved, Crusty, Earthy Road’ (Chatterjee & Lal with Cymroza Art Gallery, Bombay, 2021) and 'Zigzag Afterlives: Film Experiments from the 1960s and 1970s in India' (Camden Art Centre, London, 2020). She has proposed several new theoretical models through her extensive writings on subaltern art, media art, public art, collaborative art, transcultural art and the biennale culture in the Global South.
Nandini Krishnan
Nandini Krishnan lives in Madras with assorted four-legged and two-legged beings. She is the author of Hitched: The Modern Indian Woman and Arranged Marriage (2013) and Invisible Men: Inside India’s Transmasculine Networks (2018). This is her first translation from Tamil.
Naveen Thayyil
Naveen Thayyil is Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi. His research interests lie at the intersection of Law and STS (science and technology studies), in three fields—Legal and political theory, environmental law, and technology regulation. Prior to joining the Department, he taught at the National Law School of India, Bangalore. He holds a PhD from the Tilburg Institute of Law Technology and Society at the University of Tilburg, the Netherlands. His recent publications include “Science and Social Movements” (Oxford Bibliographies-Political Science, 2018); “Constructing global data: Automated techniques in ecological monitoring, precaution and reification of risk”, (Journal of Big Data & Society, 2018); and Visions for India-Public participation, debate and the S&T community (Current Science, 2017), co-authored with Pankaj Seksaria.
Nawaaz Ahmed
Nawaaz Ahmed was born in Tamil Nadu, India. Before turning to writing, he was a computer scientist, researching search algorithms for Yahoo. He holds an MFA from University of Michigan–Ann Arbor and is the winner of several Hopwood Awards. He is the recipient of residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He is also a Kundiman and Lambda Literary Fellow. He currently lives in Brooklyn.
Nidhi Razdan
Nidhi Razdan is an award-winning journalist who worked with NDTV for 21 years. Currently, she is Director for Strategic Programmes and Outreach, and visiting faculty at the Kautilya School of Public Policy, GITAM (Deemed to be University). She is the recipient of the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the International Press Institute (India) Award. She also edited Left Right and Centre: The Idea of India (2017)
Nistula Hebbar
Nistula Hebbar is Political Editor, The Hindu in New Delhi. She worked earlier in The Times of India, The Economic Times, Business Standard, and The Indian Express. She is also the author of a bestselling novel Kiss and Tell (2012).
Padma Ramesh
Padma Ramesh is a teacher, a trainer and a journalist by qualification and an eager film enthusiast by heart. She started her career by writing on films. In a career spanning well over two decades, she has dabbled in diverse fields from media to corporate training, to teaching, to handling CSR initiatives but through it all writing remained a constant, as did her association with films.
Pankaj Sekhsaria
Pankaj Sekhsaria is Associate Professor, Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas (CTARA) and Associate Faculty, Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), IIT-Bombay, with research interests that lie at the intersection of technology, society, science, and the environment. He has a PhD in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Maastricht University, the Netherlands, where he worked on the ‘Cultures of Innovation’ in nanoscience and technology research in India. He is also a member of the environmental action group, Kalpavriksh, and author of The Last Wave (2014), Islands in Flux: The Andaman and Nicobar Story (2017, 2019), and most recently Instrumental Lives: An Intimate Biography of an Indian Laboratory (2019).
Parakala Prabhakar
Parakala Prabhakar studied at JNU and the London School of Economics. He was the Communications Adviser to the Government of Andhra Pradesh between 2014 and 2018 and held a Cabinet rank. He is currently the MD of RightFOLIO, a knowledge enterprise based in Hyderabad. He is also a widely-read columnist on current affairs and has a popular YouTube channel, ‘Midweek Matters’, where he discusses issues related to India’s politics, economy, and contemporary society. The Crooked Timber of New India: Essays on a Republic in Crisis (2023) is his latest publication.
Paro Anand
Paro Anand is, as she says, “a fearlessly truthful writer and performance storyteller with a big heart”. She headed the National Centre for Children’s Literature and her books have received recognition both at home and abroad. She currently runs a programme called “Literature in Action” and is working on a screenplay based on her book. Her book, No Guns at my Son’s Funeral, was on the IBBY Honor List and has been translated into German and Spanish. The Little Bird who Held the Sky Up with his Feet was included in 1001 Books to Read Before You Grow Up, an international gold standard of the world’s best children’s literature.
Year : 2016
Parvathy Thiruvothu
Parvathy Thiruvothu Kottuvatta is a South Indian film actress. She shot to fame with her critically acclaimed performances in films such as Notebook (2006), Poo (2008), City of God (2011), Mariyan (2013), Bangalore Days (2014), Uttama Villain (2015), Ennu Ninte Moideen (2015), Charlie (2015), and Take Off (2017). She made her Bollywood debut with the 2017 Hindi film Qarib Qarib Single opposite the ace actor Irfan Khan. She is the first Indian female actor to have won the prestigious Silver Peacock for best actor female at the International Film Festival of India. Her first national award is a special mention for her much-celebrated role in Take Off. Many awards followed. She is one of the founding members of Women in Cinema Collective (WCC 2017), a non-profit organization for women in Malayalam cinema. WCC is a unique movement functioning as a catalyst for building an inclusive workplace.
Pavan K Varma
Pavan K Varma is a writer-diplomat and was till recently an MP in the Rajya Sabha. His best-selling books include The Greatest Ode to Lord Ram: Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas (2020), Adi Shankaracharya: Hinduism’s Greatest Thinker (2018), Being Indian (2004), and The Great Indian Middle Class (1998). He was Advisor to the Chief Minister of Bihar, India’s Ambassador in several countries, Director of the Nehru Centre in London, Official Spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs, and Press Secretary to the President of India. He was conferred an Honorary Doctoral Degree by the University of Indianapolis (2005) and conferred the Druk Thuksey, Bhutan’s highest civilian award (2012).
Perumal Murugan
Perumal Murugan is one of India’s most reputed contemporary writers. He has published ten novels, five collections of short stories, five anthologies of poetry, and ten non-fiction books. His Tamil novels in English translation include Seasons of the Palm (2004), Current Show (2004), One Part Woman (2013), and Pyre (2016). His poetry, short story, and essay collections have been translated into English as Songs of a Coward, The Goat Thief, and Black Coffee in a Coconut Shell. He has received awards from the Tamil Nadu government and Katha Books. Seasons of the Palm was shortlisted for the international Kiriyama Award (2005), and the English translation of Madhorubagan won the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize (2017).
Year: 2018
Pradeep Chhibber
Pradeep Chhibber is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He has authored and co-authored several books including Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems of India (2018) and Religious Practice and Democracy in India (2014). He holds the Indo-American Community Chair in India Studies at the University of California, Berkeley campus.
Pragya Tiwari
Pragya Tiwari writes on politics, policy and culture, edits The Indian History Collective, and is the Regional Director of Flint Asia.
Prajwal Parajuly
Prajwal Parajuly’s best-selling collection of short stories The Gurkha’s Daughter (2012) was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize in the UK and a semi-finalist for the Story Prize in the US. His first novel Land Where I Flee (2013) was a finalist for the Emile Guimet Prize and the First Novel Prize in France. He lives in Paris.
Priymvada Gopal
Priyamvada Gopal teaches Anglophone and Related Literature at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, UK. Her primary interests are in colonial and postcolonial studies. Her publications include Insurgent Empire (2019), The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (2009) and Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (2005). Her work has appeared in academic journals (ARIEL etc), periodicals (The Guardian, India Today, The Hindu etc), and on electronic media (BBC, NDTV-India, Al-Jazeera etc).
Pullela Gopichand
Pullela Gopichand is the Chief National Coach of the Indian badminton team. He won the All England Open Badminton Championships in 2001 becoming the second Indian to achieve this distinction after Prakash Padukone. The Gopichand Badminton Academy which he founded in 2008 in Hyderabad has not only produced champions like Saina Nehwal, PV Sindhu, Kidambi Srikanth, B Sai Praneeth and many others but has transformed Indian badminton. He received the Arjuna Award (1999), the Dronacharya Award (2009) and the Padma Bhushan (2014).
Rajmohan Gandhi
Rajmohan Gandhi is a historian and biographer. Besides Modern South India (2018), his other recent books include Why Gandhi Still Matters (2017), and Understanding the Founding Fathers (2016). He has taught political science and history at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, IIT-Bombay, Michigan State University and University of Illinois, where he currently serves as Research Professor.
Ram Madhav
Ram Madhav served as the National General Secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He was a member of the National Executive of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and has authored Uneasy Neighbours: India and China after Fifty Years of the War (2014).
Rimple Mehta
Rimple Mehta is an Associate Dean and Lecturer at the School of Social Sciences, Western Sydney University. She has previously worked at the School of Social Work, Tata Institute for Social Sciences, Mumbai and School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her research and field engagements broadly focus on women in prison, refugee women, and human trafficking. She engages with questions of borders, citizenship, and criminology of mobility.
Rochelle Potkar
Rochelle Potkar is the author of The Arithmetic of Breasts and Other Stories, Four Degrees of Separation and Paper Asylum, and is alumna of Iowa’s International Writing Program and Charles Wallace Writer’s fellowship, Stirling. Her ‘The Leaves of the Deodar’ won the Open Road Review story contest (2016), and ‘Chit Mahal’ appeared in The Best of Asian Short Stories. ‘Ground up’ won third place at the David Burland Poetry Prize (2017) and ‘Cellular: P.O.W.’ was shortlisted for the Hungry Hill Competition (2017). She is the co-editor of Goa: A Garland of Poems and is the co-founder of the ‘Arcs-of-a-Circle’ artists’ residency supported by the US Consulate General, Mumbai.
Year: 2019, 2018
Rohan Chakravarty
Rohan Chakravarty is a cartoonist, illustrator, and the creator of Green Humour, a series of cartoons, comics, and illustrations on wildlife and nature conservation. Cartoons from Green Humour appear periodically in newspaper columns, magazines, and journals. Illustrations from Green Humour have been used for several projects and campaigns on wildlife awareness and climate change. He is also the author of seven books (including Green Humour for a Greying Planet (2021), Naturalist Ruddy (2021), and Pugmarks and Carbon Footprints (2023). His work has won awards from UNDP, Sanctuary Asia, WWF International, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and the Bangalore Literature Festival.
Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhary
Dr. Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata and has been the Vice Chancellor of the same university since July 2012. He is currently the President of Institute of Development Studies (IDSK), and Honorary Director of Calcutta Research Group (CRG). His areas of research interest include: global politics, South Asian politics, and refugees, migration, democracy and human rights in the Global South.
Sanjaya Baru
Sanjaya Baru is a policy analyst, academic, writer, and columnist. He was media adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh; Member, National Security Advisory Board; Director, Geo-Economics and Strategy, International Institute of Strategic Studies, London; Secretary General, FICCI; and Editor, Economic Times, Financial Express, and Business Standard. His books include 1991: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Made History (2016) and The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (2014). He has taught at the University of Hyderabad; JNU, New Delhi; and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore, and currently teaches at the Indian School of Public Policy, New Delhi.
Savie Karnel
Savie Karnel is the author of the popular and critically acclaimed children’s book The Nameless God (2021) which was shortlisted the same year for the Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize. It was the only children’s book shortlisted for the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival’s ‘Words to Screen Options Market’ in 2023. Before transitioning to children’s writing, she was a journalist for The New Indian Express, Mid-Day, and Talk Magazine in Bangalore.
Serish Nanisetti
Serish Nanisetti is an author and journalist. He has done extensive research on the Qutb Shahi kingdom that ruled from Golconda fort and later from Hyderabad for over 150 years. This was the time when a small fort transformed into a bustling township that drew merchants from across the world. The trade links and culture that facilitated it continued even during the Asaf Jah rulers who supplanted the Qutb Shahis. The story fleshes out aspects of this globalised empire which are there in plain sight.
Shabnam Minwalla
Shabnam Minwalla is a freelance journalist and author of children’s books. The Six Spellmakers of Dorabji Street (2013), What Maya Saw (2017), and a new lockdown mystery Murder at Daisy Apartments (2021) are among her popular books for children. Her book Colaba: The Diamond at the Tip of Mumbai (2020) received wonderful reviews.
Sharanya Manivannan
Sharanya Manivannan is the author of the beloved picture book The Ammuchi Puchi (illustrated by Nerina Canzi). She also writes fiction and poetry for adults, including The Queen of Jasmine Country and The High Priestess Never Marries. Mermaids in the Moonlight is her debut as an illustrator, and will be followed by a graphic novel for adults, Incantations Over Water.
Shashi Tharoor
Shashi Tharoor, a third-term Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram, is the bestselling author of twenty-five books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and a former Minister of State for Human Resource Development and for External Affairs in the Government of India. He has won numerous awards, including the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2019 Sahitya Akademi Award for his nonfiction book An Era of Darkness (2016). He chairs Parliament’s Standing Committee on Chemicals and Fertilisers and has previously chaired the Standing Committee on External Affairs and the Committee on Information Technology.
Sherry Simon
Sherry Simon is a professor in the French Department at Concordia University, Canada. She has published widely in the areas of literary, intercultural and translation studies, most recently exploring the cultural history of linguistically divided cities, and the multilingual cities of the former Habsburg Empire. Among her publications are Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City (2006), and Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory (2012). She has edited or co-edited numerous volumes, including Translation Effects: The Shaping of Modern Canadian Culture (with K. Mezei and L. von Flotow; 2014), and Speaking Memory: How Translation Shapes City Life (2016).
Sita Reddy
Sita Reddy is a writer, scholar and museum curator based in Hyderabad. She has been Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution and visiting professor at the University of Hyderabad. A social historian of medicine with a doctorate from UPenn, she has written on the visual history of Ayurveda and Yoga and decolonisation of museum collections, and curated exhibitions in established and alternative galleries. Her current project on Indian botanical art grows out of grants from IFA and Wellcome Trust, and one resulting publication has been the guest-edited special issue of Marg: ‘The Weight of a Petal: Ars Botanica’ (December 2018).
Year: 2019
Sravan Kumar
Commissioned into the Regiment of Artillery in December 1981, Maj Gen Sravan Kumar (Retd) has had several prestigious command, staff, and instructional assignments including command of a field regiment, a missile brigade, and an artillery division. He is a graduate of Long Gunnery Staff Course, Defence Services Staff College, Higher Command Course and National Defence College. He has also served as a United Nations Military Observer in Angola.
Srinivas Reddy
Srinivas Reddy is a scholar, translator and musician. He trained in classical South Asian languages and literatures at Brown University and the University of California, Berkeley. His translations from Telugu and Sanskrit include Krishnadevaraya’s Telugu epic Amuktamalyada: The Giver of the Worn Garland and Kalidasa’s play Malavikagnimitram: The Dancer and the King. He is also a concert sitarist and has given numerous recitals around the world. He now lives in Gujarat and teaches at IIT, Gandhinagar.
Year: 2017, 2015
Sumanaspati Reddy
Sumanaspati Reddy recently retired from All India Radio, after serving it for three decades as producer and broadcaster. He is also a freelance writer and reviewer, translator and photographer. He passionately worked to showcase the best of Indian and international documentary cinema in Hyderabad for a decade (2004-13).
Year: 2014-15
Suresh Jayaram
Suresh Jayaram is an artist, art historian, arts administrator, and curator from Bangalore. He is the Founder, Director of Visual Art Collective/1.Shanthiroad Studio, an international artist’s residency and alternative art space in Bangalore. India. He is currently involved in art practice, urban mapping, archiving, curation, and arts education. His keen interest in environmental and urban developmental issues influences his work. He taught Art History at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishat, the College of Fine Arts in Bangalore, and later went on to become the Principal between 2005-2007.
Syed Akbaruddin
Syed Akbaruddin served as India’s Permanent Representative to the UN from 2016 till his retirement from the Indian Foreign Service in 2020. In a diplomatic career spanning thirty-five years, he spent more than a decade engaged in multilateral diplomacy—both as an Indian diplomat and an international civil servant. Currently he is Dean, Kautilya School of Public Policy, GITAM (Deemed to be University), Hyderabad.
Tabish Khair
Tabish Khair was born and educated in India, and now lives in Denmark, where he teaches at Aarhus University. During the present virus crisis, he rewrote 21 Shakespeare sonnets as a commentary on the times: Quarantined Sonnets: Sex Money and Shakespeare (2020). Published by Kitaab, Singapore, the profits will be donated to a ‘Covid’ charity in Singapore. His recent novels include Night of Happiness (2018), Just Another Jihadi Jane (2016; 2017), and How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (2014). Translated into several languages, his work has won or been shortlisted for around 20 poetry, fiction and non-fiction prizes in seven countries.
Uma Narain
Uma Narain has been a professor of Literature & Drama, and professor of General Management at the S.P. Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai, where she employed literature and theatre arts for managerial skill development of MBA students. She is a former Dean, School of Liberal Arts at NMIMS University, Mumbai – a school she founded in 2016.
Vasanthi Srinivasan
Vasanthi Srinivasan is a professor of Political Science at the University of Hyderabad. She has a PhD in Political Science from Carleton University, Ottawa and taught at the College of Humanities, Ottawa. She has been a Commonwealth and New India Foundation scholar. She is the author of Gandhi’s Conscience Keeper: C Rajagopalachari and Indian Politics (Permanent Black, 2009), Hindu Spirituality and Virtue Politics (Sage, 2014), and Virtue and Human Ends: Political Ideas from Indian Classics (Orient Blackswan, 2021). She has been a visiting scholar at CASI, University of Pennsylvania (April 2009) and SAAS, Yale University (April 2011), CPS, JNU (2012).
Vedam Jaishankar
Vedam Jaishankar is an award-winning journalist and author of Rahul Dravid: A Biography (2004) and Casting A Spell: The Story of Karnataka Cricket (2005). He also teaches at the National School of Journalism. In his career of over three-decades, he has covered cricket in all the six continents. He has worked for major newspapers, The Times of India, Indian Express, Deccan Herald, and has contributed articles to both offline and online publications such as Wisden, Sportstar, DNA, and Sulekha, MSN, Cricwizz, CricketforIndia, etc. He writes regularly for the online portal, Firstpost.
