Aranyani is the nom de plume of a native of Tamil Nadu.
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Valmik Thapar is India's foremost wildlife conservationist and an internationally renowned natural historian. The author of twenty-three books, he has also presented several documentaries for the BBC, Animal Planet and Discovery, most notably BBC's The Land of the Tiger (1997). He is a member of the National Board of Wildlife chaired by the...
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Wendy Doniger is the author of several translations of Sanskrit texts and books on Hinduism, which include the acclaimed bestsellers The Hindus: An Alternative History; Siva, the Erotic Ascetic; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology and translations of the Rig Veda and the Kamasutra. She is currently the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of...
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Devdutt Pattanaik has written over twenty-five books and 400 articles on Indian mythology for everyone from adults to children. Since 2007, he has been explaining the relationship between mythology and management through his column in the Economic Times; the talk he gave at the TED India conference in 2009; and the show Business Sutra which ran...
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Pavan K. Varma studied history at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and took a degree in law from Delhi University. He has been press secretary to the president of India, official spokesman of the Foreign Office, director general of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, and India’s ambassador to Bhutan. Having taken premature retirement from the Indian...
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Peter Smetacek, an authority on Indian butterfiles and months, has published sixty papers on them and has described a dozen new to science. He pioneered the use of lepidoptera as indicators of climate change with a paper published in 1994. He lives with his wife and two children in Bhimtal, where he runs the Butterfly Research Centre.
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Manjushree Thapa is one of South Asia's best-known writers. She has written two novels: Seasons of Flight and The Tutor of History; a collection of short stories: Tilled Earth; and four books of non-fiction: The Lives We Have Lost: Essays and Opinions on Nepal, Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy (...
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Journalist–analyst Shankkar Aiyar scooped the news of India pledging its gold reserves with the Bank of England in 1991 during its worst economic crisis since Independence. His exposé of the hush-hush operation brought home to Indians and the world the magnitude of India’s woes. As an award-winning journalist and columnist, Aiyar specializes in the...
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Born in Punjab’s Hadali village (now in Pakistan) in 1915, Khushwant Singh has acquired an iconic stature: he is, arguably, India’s best-known and most widely read author, columnist and journalist. He was founder-editor of Yojana, and editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, National Herald and the Hindustan Times....
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Nilanjana Roy spent most of her adult life writing about humans before realizing that animals were much more fun; The Wildings is her first novel. Her column on books and reading for the Business Standard has run for over fifteen years; she also writes for the International Herald Tribune on gender. Her fiction and journalism...
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Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer, Cyrus Mistry’s second novel, is set in his native Mumbai. Mistry began his writing career as a playwright, freelance journalist and short-story writer. His play Doongaji House, written in 1977 when he was twenty-one, has acquired classic status in contemporary Indian theatre in English. One of his short...
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M. Krishnan (1912-1996) is widely regarded as one of the finest naturalists the country has ever produced. A brilliant writer and photographer, his writing was showcased to fine effect in a newspaper column called ‘Country Notebook’ which appeared continuously in the Sunday Statesman for about forty-six years. Although two posthumous books that...
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Timeri N. Murari is an award-winning writer, filmmaker and playwright. Time magazine chose his film, The Square Circle, as one of its top ten films of 1997. His works include the bestselling novel Taj, which has been translated into twenty-one languages. He lives with his wife in his ancestral home in Chennai.
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Jerry Pinto lives and works in Mumbai. He has been a mathematics tutor, school librarian, journalist and columnist. He is now associated with MelJol, an NGO that works in the sphere of child rights. His published works include a book of poems, Asylum, and Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, which won the National Award for the Best Book...
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Musharraf Ali Farooqi was born in 1968 in Hyderabad, Pakistan, and currently lives in Karachi. His previous novel, The Story of a Widow, was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2010. He is also the highly acclaimed translator of Urdu classics Hoshruba and The Adventures of Amir Hamza, contemporary Urdu poet Afzal...