Profiles 2024
2025 profiles yet to be announced, stay tuned
Coming Soon
Afshan D’souza-Lodhi
Afshan D’souza-Lodhi was born in Dubai and forged in Manchester. She is a writer of scripts and poetry. Her work has been performed and translated into numerous languages across the world. Her debut poetry collection [re:desire] (2020) was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize. She is currently a BAFTA BFI Flare mentee. She received The National Theatre’s Peter Shaffer award and was also on the Warner Bros Discovery Writers Access programme. A TV pilot she wrote called “Chop Chop”, was selected for the #MuslimList (The Black List). Last year, she was the first writer-in-residence for Bluebird Pictures.
Akhil Katyal
Akhil Katyal is a writer, translator and scholar. He has published four books of poems: The Last Time I Saw You: Poems (2024), Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems (2020), How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross (2018), and Night Charge Extra (2015), and he co-edited The World that Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia (2020). He is the Associate Professor of Literature at BITS Law School in Mumbai. Years: 2025, 2021.
Amit Chaudhuri
Amit Chaudhuri is an award-winning novelist, poet, essayist and musician. His latest book Against Storytelling (2024), the third book of the ‘Literary Activism’ series, is a unique collection of essays about the meaning and significance of storytelling in our time.
Anita Nair
Anita Nair is one of India’s best-known authors whose oeuvre ranges from literary fiction to noir to poetry, children’s literature to translation. Her books have been translated into thirty-two world languages and have been adapted for audio, stage and screen. She has received several prizes and honours including the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Crossword Prize, and the National Film Award. “Anita’s Attic”, the creative writing mentorship programme she founded, has mentored over 125 writers. She is also a High-Profile Supporter of the UNHCR. Her latest novel Hot Stage (2024) is the third in the Borei Gowda noir series.
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.
Anjum Katyal
Anjum Katyal is a writer, editor, and translator. She has been Chief Editor, Seagull Books and Editor, Seagull Theatre Quarterly; Web Editor, Saregama-HMV; and Editor, Art and the City and ArthArt. Her books on theatre include Habib Tanvir: Towards an Inclusive Theatre (2012), Badal Sircar: Towards a Theatre of Conscience (2015), and Safdar Hashmi: Towards Theatre for a Democracy (2024). She has edited several volumes on theatre, translated plays by Habib Tanvir, fiction by Mahasweta Devi, and children’s stories by Meera Mukherjee. Her translation of Mahasweta Devi’s Truth/Untruth (2023) was awarded the VoW Book Award for Translation (2024). She is currently Director, Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival (AKLF).
Anusha Rao
Anusha Rao is a scholar of Sanskrit and Indian religion who likes writing new things about very old things. She is pursuing a PhD at the University of Toronto, and writes a column in the Deccan Herald presenting witty Sanskrit-flavoured takes on contemporary issues. She has coedited and translated How to Love in Sanskrit: Poems (2014) with Suhas Mahesh.
Appupen
Appupen has been one of India’s leading voices in comics since the publication of his first book Moonward (2009). He is the creator of the mythical world of Halahala. He was artist-in-residence at Angoulême in 2021. He is the co-creator of Dream Machine: AI and the Real World (2024) with Laurent Daudet, a physics professor in Paris and Co-CEO and Co-Founder of LightOn, a start-up at the forefront of ‘large language models’, the new generation of AI.
Avtar Singh
Avtar Singh is an author and editor. His publications include short stories “A Scandal in Punjab” (2024), “The Corpse Bearer” (shortlisted for the Subnivean Prize 2023), novels The Beauty of These Present Things (2000) and Necropolis (2014), Into the Forest (2024), and non-fiction work in Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Nikkei Asian Review, India Today, and Biblio. He was a summer fellow at the MacDowell Colony (2018), founding editor-in-chief of Time Out Delhi, and managing editor of The Indian Quarterly. He has lived and worked in India, the US and China, and is now based in Germany.
C Yamini Krishna
C Yamini Krishna works on film, urban, and Deccan histories. Recipient of many research awards and grants, she has contributed to several print and digital publications. She has coedited the book Claims on the City: Situated Narratives of the Urban (2024) and is the author of the forthcoming Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad from Princely City to Global City. She is a founding member of the Khidki Collective, curator of the Zor project digital archive, and co-curator of the exhibition “Chitramahal: Princely Encounters with Photography and Film” (2024). Her film Ilm ka shehar (2024) examines the 19th-century idea of knowledge.
Dinesh C Sharma
Dinesh C Sharma is an award-winning journalist and author with nearly forty years of experience of reporting on issues related to science, technology, innovation, medicine, and the environment for national and international media outlets. Among his books are The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution (2015) and Indian Innovation, Not Jugaad: 100 Ideas That Transformed India (2022). Beyond Biryani: The Making of a Globalised Hyderabad (2024) is his latest publication.
Hariharan Krishnan
Hariharan Krishnan graduated in Direction from the Film and Television Institute of India (1976) and has made nine feature films and over 350 short and documentary films. His films have won national awards and been selected at international festivals. As a writer-critic, he has contributed to several books and journals on media and cinema. Kamal Haasan: A Cinematic Journey (2024) is his latest publication.
Harsh Mander
Harsh Mander is a writer, columnist, researcher, Chairperson, Centre for Equity Studies, Delhi, and visiting faculty at IIM Ahmedabad; Vrije University, Amsterdam; Heidelberg University; and FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. His 25 books include Burning Pyres, Mass Graves and a State That Failed its People: India’s Covid Tragedy (2023), Partitions of the Heart: Unmaking the Idea of India (2018), Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India (2015), Ash in the Belly: India’s Unfinished Battle against Hunger (2012). He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of York, the inaugural Human Rights Award by the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg University, and was shortlisted for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. Years: 2025, 2021, 2016.
Huma Qureshi
Huma Qureshi epitomizes the outsider who has triumphed in the glittering world of Bollywood. Her journey from the by-lanes of Delhi to the grandeur of the Indian film industry is nothing short of inspiring. Effortlessly transcending mediums and platforms, she has meticulously charted her career path, acting in Hindi, Pan-India, international films, and shows on streaming platforms. In 2022, she started her own production house. With Zeba: An Accidental Superhero (2023) she debuts as an author.
Janaki Lenin
Janaki Lenin writes about wildlife and conservation, and the intermingling of human and animal destinies. She was a columnist for The Hindu and is the author of the two-volume My Husband and Other Animals (2024) and Every Creature Has a Story (2020), and co-author of Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: My Early Years (2024) with Romulus Whitaker.
Manoranjan Byapari
Manoranjan Byapari writes in Bengali. He taught himself to read and write at the age of 24 while in prison. He worked as a rickshaw puller, sweeper, porter, and cook. In 2018, the English translation of his memoir Ittibrite Chandal Jibon (Interrogating My Chandal Life) won the Hindu Prize for non-fiction. In 2019, he was awarded the Gateway Lit Fest Writer of the Year Prize. In 2022, he received the Shakti Bhatt Prize and the English translation of his novel Chhera Chhera Jibon (Imaan) was longlisted for the JCB Prize. In 2021, he became a member of the Bengal Legislative Assembly.
Menka Shivdasani
Menka Shivdasani is an award-winning poet, editor, and translator. She is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Seven Queens: Sindhi Folktales Retold in English Verse (2024); co-translator of Freedom and Fissures, an anthology of Sindhi Partition poetry (1998); editor of a SPARROW anthology of women’s writing (2014); and editor of The Big Bridge Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry (2024). She co-founded Poetry Circle in Bombay in 1986 and has organised poetry festivals for the global movement 100 Thousand Poets for Change since 2011. She is the Co-Chair of Asia Pacific Writers and Translators (APWT).
MK Raina
MK Raina is a well-known actor, filmmaker, and academic. He has acted in more than 150 plays, directed over 160 theatre productions, and is a major contributor to Indian New Wave cinema. He is instrumental in reviving ‘Bhand Pather’, the traditional folk theatre of Kashmir, and received several honours including the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award and the BV Karanth Lifetime Achievement Award. He has been a fellow at Stanford University, and a Scholar-in-Residence at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Before I Forget: A Memoir (2024) chronicles his life, career, and activism against the backdrop of major social and political changes in India.
Mohinder (Jimmy) Amarnath
Mohinder (Jimmy) Amarnath is the son of the legendary cricketer Lala Amarnath. He played for India’s national cricket team from 1969 to 1989 and scored 4378 test runs. Nine of his eleven test centuries were scored overseas. He was the Man of the Match in the semi-final and the final of the 1983 Cricket World Cup which India won. He was named one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year in 1984 and received the Arjuna Award the same year. Fearless: A Memoir (2024) is the story of his cricketing life.
Moupia Basu
Moupia Basu studied at the University of Delhi and worked as a journalist with some of the leading publications in the country. She is the author of Khoka (2015), The Queen’s Last Salute (2019), and Anarkali and Salim: A Retelling of Mughal-e-Azam (2020). Qutb Bhagwati (2024) is a retelling of the Mohammad Quli–Bhagmati love story.
Nandita Bhavnani
Nandita Bhavnani has an MA in anthropology. She is also a qualified chartered accountant with a law degree. She has been engaged in extensive research on Sindhi culture and history since 1997. She has conducted interviews of Partition survivors in India, Pakistan, and the UAE. She has also travelled widely across Sindh. She is the author of Sindhnamah (2018), The Making of Exile: Sindhi Hindus and the Partition of India (2014), and I Will & I Can: The Story of Jai Hind College (2011).
Preeti Gill
Preeti Gill is an independent literary agent, commissioning editor, and rights director. She has written extensively on issues of conflict and women in Northeast India. She is the editor of The Peripheral Centre: Voices from India’s Northeast (2010), Bearing Witness: A Report on the Impact of Conflict on Women in Nagaland and Assam (2011), She Stoops to Kill (2019), and co-editor of Insider/ Outsider: Belonging and Unbelonging in India’s Northeast (2018), and But I Am One of You: Northeast India and the Struggle to Belong (2024). Her documentary Rambuai: Mizoram’s ‘Trouble’ Years (co-produced with Sanjoy Hazarika) was released in September 2016.
Radhika Jha
Radhika Jha is the internationally bestselling author of Smell: A Novel (199), Lanterns On Their Horns (2009) and My Beautiful Shadow (2014). The story “Sleepers” from her short story collection The Elephant and The Maruti (2003) appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. She studied at Amherst College, the University of Chicago, and the University of Paris (V) and lives in Italy/New York. Her latest novel, Hidden Forest (2024) is about identity and what it means to belong.
Rahul Bhatia
Rahul Bhatia is an award-winning writer and journalist. He has published in the New Yorker, Guardian Long Reads, and Caravan among others. He is a Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow (2022-23) and a winner of the True Story Award (2024). He mentors writers and journalists as part of the ‘South Asia Speaks’ collective, and was a co-founder of the Peepli Project, a journalism non-profit. A former advertising art director, he graduated in communication design from Pratt Institute, New York. The New India: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy (2024) is his latest publication.
Rajender Amarnath
Rajender Amarnath is the youngest son of the legendary cricketer Lala Amarnath. A graduate of St. Stephen’s College, he played first-class cricket in India and professional cricket in England. He is an author, commentator and cricket analyst. He is the co-author of Fearless: A Memoir (2024), the story of his brother Mohinder Amarnath's cricketing life.
Rita Kothari
Rita Kothari is a multilingual scholar and translator. She is a Professor of English and Co-director of the Ashoka Centre for Translation at Ashoka University. Her ethnographic research on marginal communities—through religion, caste, occupation, and gender—focuses on narratives of identity, raising questions of both linguistic and cultural translation. She has translated extensively from Gujarati and Sindhi into English and occasionally vice versa. The edited volume, A Multilingual Nation (2017) and the monographs, The Burden of Refuge (2009) and Uneasy Translations (2022) are among her notable works.
Romulus Earl Whitaker III
Romulus Earl Whitaker III is unquestionably one of India’s best-known figures in wildlife conservation. He is famous for establishing the Madras Snake Park, the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust, the Andaman and Nicobar Environmental Team, and for his work conserving India’s rainforests—the habitat of many endangered species. Internationally, he has received the Rolex Award for Enterprise and the Whitley Award for contribution to nature conservation. In 2018, he was awarded the Padma Shri. He has co-authored Snakes of India: The Field Guide (2004) with Ashok Captain and Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: My Early Years (2024) with Janaki Lenin.
Ruthvika Rao
Ruthvika Rao was born in Warangal and grew up in Hyderabad. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and recipient of the Henfield Prize in fiction. She has taught creative writing at the University of Toronto and the University of Iowa. The Fertile Earth (2024), her debut novel, is a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel prize.
Saaz Aggarwal
Saaz Aggarwal is a writer, artist, and independent researcher. She taught mathematics at Ruparel College and was a features editor at Times of India, Mumbai. She wrote poetry and columns for national print media (1993-2010)—mostly humour, parody and nonsense, with a long stretch on books for Sunday Mid-day. She started writing books in 2006 and has published biographies, corporate histories, and family chronicles. Her books on Sindh are in the libraries of global universities and have featured in litfests and conferences in India, Pakistan and the UK. Her paintings and mixed-media collections are held by collectors worldwide and corporate offices in India.
Samrat Choudhury
Samrat Choudhury is an author, commissioning editor, and former editor of dailies in India’s major metropolises, Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. His works include The Braided River (2021), The Urban Jungle (2011), and Northeast India: A Political History (2023). He has co-edited with Preeti Gill Insider/Outsider: Belonging and Unbelonging in India’s Northeast (2018), and But I Am One of You: Northeast India and the Struggle to Belong (2024). Some of his essays and short stories have been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Years: 2025, 2019.
Sapna Moti Bhavnani
Sapna Moti Bhavnani is a pioneer entrepreneur; columnist; author of a self-help book for teenage girls; producer of ‘One Billion Rising’ at Carter Road (2013); spokesperson for PETA, ‘World For All’, ‘Free A Girl’; founder member of ‘Stop Acid Attacks’ (2013); and founder of ‘Wench Films’ (2020) and ‘Wench Film Festival’ (2021). She is an actor in award-winning plays “Nirbhaya” (2013) and “Jatinga” (2017), and the Producer/Director of the documentary Sindhustan (2019) about the largest migration of a culture (Sindhi) in history told through tattoos on her body. Sindhustan has won 11 Awards, travelled to 23 international festivals, and is now streaming on MovieSaints.
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.
Seetha Ratnakar
Seetha Ratnakar is an independent filmmaker who started her media career with Doordarshan. In 1985, her programme “Rasavrishti” featuring Chitra Visveswaran was the official Indian entry for the Golden Prague Festival, Czech Republic. Her thematic presentation “Endenrum Podhigai” was nominated for a Doordarshan National award in 2010. Her documentary, Cosmic Connection won the Gold Remi Award at the WorldFest International Film Festival, Houston, in 2014. During the pandemic, she scripted and directed a short film Pillow Talk. Her documentary Asamana Anasuya (2023) is a tribute to the musical legacy of her mother Vinjamuri Anasuya Devi and her contribution to Telugu folk music.
Sheena Patel
Sheena Patel is a writer and assistant director for the film and TV industry. She is part of the “4 Brown Girls Who Write” collective and her debut novel I’m a Fan (2022) won a British Book Award in the Discover category, has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and is a finalist for the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.
Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan
Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan is an award-winning voice-over artist, poet, editor, and author of a dozen fiction and non-fiction books. She won the 68th National Film Awards (2022) for Best Narration Voiceover for the film Rhapsody of Rains: Monsoons of Kerala. She has published children’s books in India and the United States, including the award-winning Indi-Alphabet (2018), Prince with a Paintbrush: The Story of Raja Ravi Varma (2021), It’s Time to Rhyme (2022), and Parvati the Elephant’s Very Important Day (2022). Her first book for adults, Good Innings: The Extraordinary, Ordinary Life of Lily Tharoor (2022), is being translated into Malayalam.
Stephen P. Huyler
Stephen P. Huyler is an art historian, cultural anthropologist, photographer, and author. His life has been dedicated to exploring, surveying, preserving, and celebrating India’s rich artistic and cultural heritage. For 50 years, he has travelled through Indian villages for an average of four months each year, and his seven books, including Transformed by India: A Life (2024), invoke an India rarely seen by outsiders and unknown to many Indians today. He has been a Consultant/ Guest Curator for more than 25 major museum exhibitions of Indian art, with solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian, the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), and the Kodak Center for Creative Imaging.
Subba Rao Duvvuri
Subba Rao Duvvuri was Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (2008-13), Finance Secretary to the Government of India (2007-08), and Secretary to the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (2005-07). Since 2013, he has been a Visiting Fellow at the National University of Singapore and the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently Visiting Faculty at Yale School of Management. His publications include Who Moved My Interest Rate? (2016), best known for the way it explains the policy dilemmas confronting an emerging economy’s central bank in a globalized world, and Just a Mercenary? Notes from My Life and Career (2024).
Subhadra Anand
Subhadra Anand was born in Hyderabad (Sindh), educated in Delhi, worked as a lecturer and college principal in Mumbai, and was the CEO of Save the Children India. Her National Integration of Sindhis (1995) continues to be a seminal reference book and her novel Tryst With Koki (2023) traces a “post-partition journey of survival, sustenance and strength.” Her vision for a cultural centre for Sindhis in India was realized with “Jhulelal Tirthdham,” a cultural complex in Narayan Sarovar in Kutch, at the mouth of the Arabian Sea, that will soon house a museum and an amphitheatre alongside the magnificent Jhulelal temple.
Suhas Mahesh
Suhas Mahesh is a scholar of Sanskrit and Prakrit with a terrible weakness for good verse, rare manuscripts, and arcane grammar. He is a materials physicist with a PhD from the University of Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has co-edited and translated How to Love in Sanskrit: Poems (2014) with Anusha Rao.
Sunitha Krishnan
Sunitha Krishnan is an activist, author, and film producer. She founded Prajwala—Asia’s largest institution combating sex trafficking and sex crime—in 1996 at Hyderabad and has assisted in the rescue of nearly 29000 young girls and women across 12 countries and prevented nearly 16000 children from being inducted into prostitution. She was awarded the Padma Shri (2016) and was recognized as one of the 150 “Fearless Women in the World’ by Newsweek. I Am What I Am (2024) is the memoir of this relentless crusader for the rights of sex crime and trafficking victims.
Susheel Gajwani
Susheel Gajwani is an author and filmmaker. His fourteenth feature film, Aakhreen Train-The Last Train (2023) in Sindhi has been loved by audiences all over India and abroad. He has created ‘Roots-The Time Travellers,’ a Musical Stage Show, based on Partition Poetry in Sindhi and performed in English, Sindhi, Hindi, Punjabi, and Marathi. He was a Doordarshan Producer, Founder-Vice-President of Money Satellite Television Channel, and a recipient of the Rotary Foundation Technical Fellowship to study American Media at New York University. A postgraduate in English and human resources, he writes books and newspaper articles and conducts training workshops on life skills.
V Ramaswamy
V Ramaswamy has translated the works of Manoranjan Byapari, Subimal Mishra, and Shahidul Zaheer. His translation of Manoranjan Byapari’s novel, The Nemesis (2023) was shortlisted for the JCB Prize for literature.
Vivek Nityanand
Vivek Nityanand is trained as a biologist. A scientist and a science communicator, he is currently a BBSRC David Phillips Fellow at the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution and the Biosciences Institute at Newcastle University, UK. He has several publications in the fields of evolutionary biology, animal behaviour, and psychology. He is also an illustrator and has published short stories, including in Penguin India’s new writing anthology, First Proof 7. Beyond Doubt: Overconfidence and What It Means for Modern Society (2024) is his latest publication.
