Vikas Swarup

Vikas Swarup was born in Allahabad in a family of lawyers. He did his schooling from Boys' High School & College, Allahabad and pursued further studies at Allahabad University with subjects Psychology, History and Philosophy. He joined IFS in 1986. He is married to Aparna and they have two sons, Aditya and Varun.
He is presently posted in New Delhi as Joint Secretary (United Nations – Political), he served as Consul General of India in Osaka-Kobe, Japan from 2009 to 2013, South Africa (2006-2009), the United Kingdom (2000-2003), Ethiopia (1997-2000), United States (1993-1997) and Turkey (1987-1990). His debut novel, Q and A, tells the story of how a penniless waiter in Mumbai becomes the biggest quiz show winner in history. Critically acclaimed in India and abroad, this international bestseller is being translated into 40 languages. It was shortlisted for the Best First Book by the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and won South Africa’s Exclusive Books Boeke Prize 2006, as well as the Prix Grand Public at the 2007 Paris Book Fair.
A BBC radio play based on the book won the Gold Award for Best Drama at the Sony Radio Academy Awards 2008 and the IVCA Clarion Award 2008. Harper Collins brought out the audio book, read by Kerry Shale, which won the Audie for best fiction audio book of the year. Film4 of the UK had optioned the movie rights and the movie titled Slumdog Millionaire, directed by Danny Boyle was first released in the US to great critical acclaim. It won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival and three awards (Best Film, Best Director and Most Promising Newcomer) at the British Independent Film Awards 2008. The National Board of Review picked Slumdog Millionaire as the best film of 2008. The movie swept five awards out of its six nominations at the Critics' Choice Awards, and all four nominations awarded at the Golden Globe Awards which includes best director, picture, screenplay & score, and seven BAFTA Awards. It received 10 Oscar nominations of which it won 8, including Best Picture and Best Director. From The NY Times' report: "Though it had no actors nominated for prizes, [it also] swept many awards other than those on the top line, including prizes for cinematography, sound mixing, score and film editing. Slumdog’s eight Oscars was the largest total won by a single film since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won 11 in 2004." The film was released in the UK on 9th of January 2009 and in India on 23rd January.
Vikas Swarup's second novel Six Suspects, published by Transworld, was released on July 28, 2008 and is being translated into several languages. It has also been optioned for a film by the BBC and Starfield productions.
Swarup's short story ‘A Great Event’ has been published in ‘The Children’s Hours: Stories of Childhood’, a bold and moving anthology of stories about childhood to support Save the Children and raise awareness for its fight to end violence against children.
Vikas Swarup has participated in the Oxford Literary Festival, the Turin International Book Fair, the Auckland Writers’ Conference, the Sydney Writers’ Festival, the Kitab Festival in New Delhi, the St. Malo International Book & Film Festival in France and the 'Words on Water' Literary Festival at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Vijay Singh

Vijay Singh is an Indian novelist, screenplay-writer and film-maker living in Paris.
A graduate in History from St Stephen's College, Delhi, with a postgraduate degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, he moved to Paris for doctoral work at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. This move-over was precipitated principally by his passion for French literature and surrealism, particularly after a chance encounter with André Breton’s Manifestoes of Surrealism.
While still a student in Paris, he started contributing articles to the French press in the early eighties. This was the beginning of his career as a journalist. He has written extensively for several leading French and international newspapers such as Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique, Libération and The Guardian, covering some of the most turbulent events of that epoch – Operation Blue Star, the Bhopal Gas tragedy, Indira Gandhi’s assassination and its gruesome aftermath…
In 1984, a leading French publisher asked him to write a book on India. Vijay Singh decided to undertake a long and hazardous journey down the holy river Ganges, from its source in the snow-bound Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. With this “pilgrimage” as the central thread, and a surrealist Franco-Indian love-story as his inspiration, he wrote his first novel, Jaya Ganga, In Search of the River Goddess (Ramsay 1985, Penguin 1989, Rupa 2005). The book received stupendous response from the entire French press.
Since then, Vijay Singh has written several books that have won wide critical acclaim internationally: La Nuit Poignardée (Flammarion, 1987), Whirlpool of Shadows (Jonathan Cape, 1992, Rupa 1992,  2005) and a dreamy tale for children, The River Goddess (Gallimard Jeunesse/Moonlight, 1994). Whirlpool of Shadows was listed by the 1992 Booker Prize Winner, Barry Unsworth, as one his three Best Books of the Year in The Sunday Times, UK.  
Vijay Singh’s entry into the world of images and cinema was pure accident. In 1989, a young French producer knocked at his door. He didn’t have any specific project or film in mind, but he nevertheless insisted on doing a documentary with Vijay Singh. Singh’s idea to make a documentary on the theme of man and animal led to the making of Man and Elephant, a 30’ film, part fiction part documentary, on the relationship between an elephant keeper and his elephant in Kerala. To date, this film has been shown on over 100 televisions worldwide.
Jaya Ganga was Vijay Singh’s first feature film, an adaptation of his earlier novel. It premiered in competition at the World Film Festival, Montreal, and then travelled to over 50 international festivals. It ran for 49 weeks in the Paris cinemas before playing on 80 screens in the UK. The film received tremendous press response internationally. The Guardian called it “a mesmerising film...One of the most authentic depictions of everyday Indian magic ever screened.”
His second feature film, One Dollar Curry, was shot entirely in Paris and released in France and the UK. It ran to full houses for several weeks in North India and was highly acclaimed by the press.
Vijay Singh is now working on a screen adaptation of his novel, Whirlpool of Shadows, and hopes to shoot the film in 2007.
Vijay Singh has been a guest speaker at several conferences held worldwide and has also made individual presentations of his work at the Universities of Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford. He has also held workshops for film students on “Literature and Cinema” at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune.
He was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Award for the screenplay of Jaya Ganga, La Titine Best Film Award for his documentary Man and Elephant, and the Prix Villa Médicis hors les murs Award for foreign literature.

Ved Mehta

Ved Mehta Ved Parkash Mehta (Born March 21, 1934) is a writer who was born in Lahore, British India (now a Pakistani city) to a Hindu family. He lost his sight at the age of four as the result of an attack of cerebrospinal meningitis. Because of the limited prospects for blind people in general, his father, a doctor, sent him over 1,300 miles away to the Dadar School for the Blind in Bombay.
Mehta has lived in the Western world since 1949; he became an American citizen in 1975. He was educated at Pomona College, at Balliol College, Oxford where he read Modern History, and at Harvard University. His first book, an autobiography called Face to Face, which placed his early life in the context of Indian politics and history and Anglo-Indian relations, was published in 1957. Since then he has written more than 24 books, including several that deal with the subject of blindness, as well as hundreds of articles and short stories, for British, Indian and American publications such as The New Yorker, where he was a staff writer from 1961 to 1995. He left the magazine after, as he has claimed, he was "terminated" by editor Tina Brown.

Uma Parameswaran

Uma Parameswaran was born and raised in India and currently lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Uma received a Master of Arts degree and Diploma in Journalism from Nagpur University, a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing from Indiana University and a Ph.D. from Michigan State University. She started as a newspaper reporter in India and joined the faculty of the University of Winnipeg upon arrival in Winnipeg. She has written plays that were produced in Winnipeg and published in Toronto and India. She has written or edited ten scholarly books in post colonial literature and women focused research. Her poems have appeared in various journals and having been at the University of Winnipeg for three decades, she has published a great many articles and essays over the years. She has also been active in The Writers Union of Canada, serving on the National Council in various capacities throughout the 1990s, a past president of The Manitoba Writers' Guild and a board member on various women's organizations. As founder of the Performing Arts and Literature of India (PALI), she has been involved in organizing instruction in the classical dances of India in Winnipeg (the first to do so in 1978) and producing a weekly show (1978-1990) on India and Indians in Canada on community television.
Awards
Winner, What was Always Hers, Jubilee Award, 2000. Winner, What was Always Hers, New Muse Award, 1999. Winner, Caribe Playwriting Competition, 1980. Winner, The Door I Shut Behind Me, Lady Eaton Award, 1967.
Bibliography of published books
Mangoes on the Maple Tree. Set in Winnipeg against the flood of 1997, the novel spans twenty days in the life of an Indo-Canadian family. Broken Jaw Press;1-896647-79-0; 2002; Fiction.
Sisters at the Well. Opens with the Kanishka Cycle of poems for the 15th anniversary of the crash of Air India flight 182, and contains new poems in addition to previously published ones. Indialog Publications. 81-87981-14-8; 2002. Poetry.
The Sweet Smell of Mother's Milk-Wet Bodice. Broken Jaw Press; 1-896647-72-3; 2001. Fiction.
What was Always Hers. Two novellas and three short stories; half of them are humorous and the others are intense stories of women's relationships. Broken Jaw Press; 1-896647-12-X; 1999. Short Stories.
Sons Must Die and Other Plays. Several dance dramas (written for Indo-Canadian stage productions) and one full length play. The title play is set against the Indo-Pakistani
war of 1947-48. Prestige Books; 81-7551-020-X; 1998. Drama.
Trishanku and Other Writings. There are about eighty poems, in about fifteen voices, which together delineate the Indo-Canadian experience of the 1970s. Prestige; 81-7551-019-6; 1998. Poetry and Short Stories.
Trishanku. TSAR Books; 0-920661-04-1; 1998. Poetry.
The Door I Shut Behind Me. The title story is a short story set in Winnipeg in the late 1960s. East-West Books; 81-85336-35-0; 1990. Poetry.
Rootless but Green are the Boulevard Trees. A play set in Winnipeg where the protagonist is a whole family, reinforcing the concept of family in Indo-Canadian culture. TSAR Books; 1987; Drama.

Tom Alter

Tom Alter was in born 1950. He is an Indian actor of American origin. As a thespian and television actor, he is most prominently known for his work in Hindi language Indian cinema.
A native of the small Uttarakhand city of Mussoorie, Tom Alter is the son of American missionaries and has lived for years between the metropolis of Mumbai and the Himalayan hill station of Landour. As a child, he studied Hindi and Urdu and, as a result, has occasionally been referred to as the "Blue-eyed saheb with the impeccable Hindi." He has recently been awarded Padmasri by the Indian government
Alter is uniquely talented in his fluency in Hindi and knowledge of Indian culture. He has worked for noted filmmakers like Satyajit Ray in Shatranj Ke Khiladi (The Chess Players) and Ismail Merchant. In Sardar, the 1993 film biography of Indian leader Sardar Patel, which focused on the events surrounding the partition and independence of India, Tom Alter portrayed Lord Mountbatten. He has also played Indian characters in Indian television series, such as the long-running Junoon, in which he was the sadistic mob lord Keshav Kalsi. Also acted in hollywood movie One Night With The King with the legendary Peter O'Toole.
He is a writer with books like The Longest Race,Rerun at Rialto,The Best in the world,and also a sports journalist with a special interest in Cricket,a game on which he has written extensively in publications like Sportsweek,Outlook,Cricket talk,Sunday Observer,Debonair,etc.He plays cricket for a film industry team MCC(Match Cut Club),consisting of Naseeruddin Shah,Satish Shah,Vishal Bhardwaj,Aamir Khan,Nana Patekar,Bhupinder Singh,Amarinder Sangha,among others. In 1996 he appeared in the Assamese-language film Adajya, and in 2007 acted in the theatrical reproduction of William Dalrymple's City of Djinns alongside Zohra Sehgal. A solo play 'Maulana',based on Maulana Azad,is also running to rave reviews in India and abroad. Tom Alter's first cousin Stephen Alter, also born and raised in India, is a notable author and teacher. Tom and Stephen are graduates of Woodstock School, Mussoorie.

Tarun Tejpal

Tarun J Tejpal, 42, was brought up all over India, as his father was an army officer. He studied economics in Chandigarh and became a journalist in the 1980s, working for India Today magazine and helping to found the rival Outlook. As the creator of India Ink, he became the first publisher of Arundhati Roy. In 2000, he created Tehelka.com, the online magazine that in 2001 broke a story about bribery in defence contracts that led to the resignation of the Indian minister of defence. He then raised the money to establish Tehelka as a weekly newspaper, and is now its editor-in-chief. In 2002, he was named by Business Week as a leader of change in Asia. Tejpal’s debut novel, The Alchemy of Desire, is published this week by Picador. He lives in New Delhi with his wife and two daughters.

Sunetra Gupta

Sunetra Gupta was born in Calcutta, India, on 15 March 1965 and spent her childhood in Ethiopia and Zambia. She returned to Calcutta as a teenager and began writing, encouraged by her father who introduced her to the work of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. She studied biology at the University of Princeton and has a Ph.D. from the University of London. She is a Reader in Epidemiology at Oxford University.
She is the author of four novels, Memories of Rain (1992), originally inspired by Brendan Kenelly's adaptation of Medea; The Glassblower's Breath (1993), about a single day in the lives of a butcher, a baker and a candle maker and the women they all love, set in Calcutta, New York and London; Moonlight into Marzipan (1995), the story of a remarkable discovery made in a crumbling garage laboratory in Calcutta; and A Sin of Colour (1999), which narrates the history of three generations of a wealthy Indian family from Calcutta. A Sin of Colour won the Southern Arts Literature Prize.
Sunetra Gupta lives in Oxford with her husband and two daughters.