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.

Siddhartha Deb

Siddhartha Deb was born in northeastern India in 1970. His first novel, The Point of Return, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His reviews and journalism have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Guardian, The Nation, the New Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement. He came to New York on a literary fellowship in 1998, and now divides his time between India and New York.

Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor Shashi Tharoor was born in 1956 in London and educated in Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi (BA in History, St. Stephen's College), and the United States. He holds a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University (Shashi Tharoor 2).
Since May 1978, Tharoor has worked for the United Nations. He served over 11 years with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, whose Singapore office he headed during the "boat people" crisis (SAJA). In October 1989 he was transferred to the peace-keeping staff at the United Nations Headquarters in New York (Shashi Tharoor 2). In this position, he served as Special Assistant to the Under-Secretary-General for Peace-keeping Operations. Dealing with a range of issues in this capacity, Tharoor addressed a variety of peace-keeping issues around the world and led the team responsible for the United Nations peace-keeping operations in the former Yugoslavia (Shashi Tharoor 2). On January 1, 1997 Shashi Tharoor was appointed Executive Assistant to Secretary of the United Nations Kofi Annan (Shashi Tharoor 2).
As an author, Shashi Tharoor has written many editorials, commentaries, and short stories in Indian and Western publications (SAJA). In addition, he is the winner of several journalism and literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers' Prize (SAJA).
He is a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, the India International Centre in New Delhi, and the American PEN Center (SAJA). He is also an elected Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities 1995-96 (SAJA).
Shashi Tharoor is married to writer Tilottama Tharoor and is the father of twin sons (SAJA).

Shashi Deshpande

Shashi Deshpande was born in Karnataka, daughter of the renowned Kannada writer and Sanskrit scholar, Shriranga. She has degrees in Economics and Law as well as a postgraduate degree in English and a diploma in Journalism. Her writing career began after the birth of her two sons, with a collection of short stories, The Legacy which came out in 1978. Since then four more collections have been published.She is also the author of four children's books and six novels, the best known of which, That Long Silence, received the Sahitya Akademi award. Two of her other novels, The Dark Holds No Terror and Roots and Shadows have also received major awards. Her work has also been translated into a number of Indian and foreign languages.
In June 2004, Samina took the novel's message "to the streets" when she helped co-found a Muslim American feminist organization called Daughters of Hajar. Fellow cofounders are Asra Nomani and Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur. Together with a handful of other Muslim American women, the three founders walked peacefully into Asra Nomani's mosque in Morgantown, W. Virginia to reclaim women's rights to enter a mosque from the front door (and not, as was so often required of women in many mosques across the nation, through back entrances) and to pray in the main sanctuary. That small act created ripples across the world and was featured in every major newspaper and media outlet. There is a photo of the group in TIME Magazine walking toward the mosque. In it, Samina appears in a green parrot head scarf and black stiletto heels. One year after the event, the largest Muslim organization in America officially changed its policy, asserting that any woman could enter any mosque in the U.S. through the front door and pray in the main hall, if she so wanted. Since then, Samina has been involved with prominent Muslim organizations in the U.S. to help change the national dialogue about Islam and especially the perception of Muslim women.
Essays of hers have most recently been included in "Altared: bridezillas, big love, breakups, and what women really think about contemporary weddings", "The May Queen: Women on Life, Love & Career" and "Living Islam Out Loud" anthologies. She has also written for publications as diverse as Self and Child Magazines, The New York Times and The San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in California with her son.

Samina Ali

Samina Ali was born in Hyderabad, India and raised both there and in the United States. Her debut novel, MADRAS ON RAINY DAYS, was awarded the Prix Premier Roman Etranger 2005 Award by France and was also chosen as the finalist for both the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction as well as the California Book Reviewers Award. Poets & Writers Magazine named MADRAS as one of the Top 5 Best Debut Novels of the Year 2004 and Samina was featured on the cover of the June/July issue. Samina speaks regularly at colleges across the country and has also been traveling internationally with the U.S. State Department.
In June 2004, Samina took the novel's message "to the streets" when she helped co-found a Muslim American feminist organization called Daughters of Hajar. Fellow cofounders are Asra Nomani and Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur. Together with a handful of other Muslim American women, the three founders walked peacefully into Asra Nomani's mosque in Morgantown, W. Virginia to reclaim women's rights to enter a mosque from the front door (and not, as was so often required of women in many mosques across the nation, through back entrances) and to pray in the main sanctuary. That small act created ripples across the world and was featured in every major newspaper and media outlet. There is a photo of the group in TIME Magazine walking toward the mosque. In it, Samina appears in a green parrot head scarf and black stiletto heels. One year after the event, the largest Muslim organization in America officially changed its policy, asserting that any woman could enter any mosque in the U.S. through the front door and pray in the main hall, if she so wanted. Since then, Samina has been involved with prominent Muslim organizations in the U.S. to help change the national dialogue about Islam and especially the perception of Muslim women.
Essays of hers have most recently been included in "Altared: bridezillas, big love, breakups, and what women really think about contemporary weddings", "The May Queen: Women on Life, Love & Career" and "Living Islam Out Loud" anthologies. She has also written for publications as diverse as Self and Child Magazines, The New York Times and The San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in California with her son.

Salman Rushdie

Salman rushdie was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) on 19 June 1947. He went to school in Bombay and at Rugby in England, and read History at King's College, Cambridge, where he joined the Cambridge Footlights theatre company. After graduating, he lived with his family who had moved to Pakistan in 1964, and worked briefly in television before returning to England, beginning work as a copywriter for an advertising agency. His first novel, Grimus, was published in 1975.
His second novel, the acclaimed Midnight's Children, was published in 1981. It won the Booker Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), an Arts Council Writers' Award and the English-Speaking Union Award, and in 1993 was judged to have been the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the award's 25-year history. The novel narrates key events in the history of India through the story of pickle-factory worker Saleem Sinai, one of 1001 children born as India won independence from Britain in 1947. The critic Malcolm Bradbury acclaimed the novel's achievement in The Modern British Novel (Penguin, 1994): 'a new start for the late-twentieth-century novel.'
Rushdie's third novel, Shame (1983), which many critics saw as an allegory of the political situation in Pakistan, won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. The publication in 1988 of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, lead to accusations of blasphemy against Islam and demonstrations by Islamist groups in India and Pakistan. The orthodox Iranian leadership issued a fatwa against Rushdie on 14 February 1989 - effectively a sentence of death - and he was forced into hiding under the protection of the British government and police. The book itself centres on the adventures of two Indian actors, Gibreel and Saladin, who fall to earth in Britain when their Air India jet explodes. It won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1988.
Salman Rushdie continued to write and publish books, including a children's book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), a warning about the dangers of story-telling that won the Writers' Guild Award (Best Children's Book), and which he adapted for the stage (with Tim Supple and David Tushingham. It was first staged at the Royal National Theatre, London.) There followed a book of essays entitled Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991); East, West (1994), a book of short stories; and a novel, The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), the history of the wealthy Zogoiby family told through the story of Moraes Zogoiby, a young man from Bombay descended from Sultan Muhammad XI, the last Muslim ruler of Andalucía.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet, published in 1999, re-works the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the context of modern popular music. His most recent novel, Fury, set in New York at the beginning of the third millennium, was published in 2001. He is also the author of a travel narrative, The Jaguar Smile (1987), an account of a visit to Nicaragua in 1986.
Salman Rushdie is Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made Distinguished Fellow in Literature at the University of East Anglia in 1995. He was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1993 and the Aristeion Literary Prize in 1996, and has received eight honorary doctorates. He was elected to the Board of American PEN in 2002. The subjects in his new book, Step Across This Line: Collected Non-fiction 1992-2002 (2002), range from popular culture and football to twentieth-century literature and politics. Salman Rushdie is also co-author (with Tim Supple and Simon Reade) of the stage adaptation of Midnight's Children, premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2002.
Shalimar The Clown, the story of Max Ophuls, his killer and daughter, and a fourth character who links them all, was published in 2005. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award.
Salman Rushdie became a KBE in 2007. In 2008, his latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence (2008), was published and Midnight's Children won the 'Best of the Booker' Prize. He also co-edited The Best American Short Stories (2008) with Heidi Pitlor.
Bibliography
Grimus Gollancz, 1975
Midnight's Children Cape, 1981
Shame Cape, 1983
The Jaguar Smile Picador, 1987
The Satanic Verses Viking, 1988
Haroun and the Sea of Stories Granta, 1990
In Good Faith Granta, 1990
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 Granta, 1991
The Wizard of Oz British Film Institute, 1992
East, West Cape, 1994
The Moor's Last Sigh Cape, 1995
The Vintage Book of Indian Writing (co-editor with Elizabeth West) Vintage, 1997
The Ground Beneath Her Feet Cape, 1999
Fury Cape, 2001
Step Across This Line: Collected Non-fiction 1992-2002 Cape, 2002 Shalimar The Clown Cape, 2005
The Best American Short Stories (editor with Heidi Pitlor) Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (US), 2008
The Enchantress of Florence Cape, 2008

R Raja Rao

R Raja Rao was born Hassan, in the state of Mysore in south India, into a well-known Brahman family. He was educated at Muslim schools. After taking a degree from Madras University, he left India for Europe, where he remained for a decade. Rao studied at the universities of Montpellier and the Sorbonne, doing research in Christian theology and history. In 1931 he married a French academic, Camille Mouly. Later he depicted the breakdown of their marriage in The Serpent and the Rope. For his first stories Rao published in French and English. During 1931-32 he contributed four articles written in Kannada to Jaya Karnataka, an influential journal.
When his marriage disintegrated in 1939, Rao returned to India and began his first period of residence in an ashram. During WW II, he travelled widely in India searching for his spiritual heritage and in 1942 he was active in an underground movement against the British. During these years he edited the literary magazine Tomorrow.
Rao's involvement in the nationalist movement is reflected in his first two books. The novel Kanthapura (1938) was an account of the non-violent resistance against the British seen from the perspective of s small South Indian village. In the style and structure of the Indian vernacular tales, a talkative old woman tells how a village community obtains from daily life, with its millennia-old worship of the local deity, the strength for non-violent resistance to the British Raj. The work was highly praised by E.M. Forster. Rao returned to the theme of Gandhi in the story collection The Cow of the Barricades (1947).
After the war, Rao spent much of his time in France and travelling throughout the world. He visited America in 1950 and later spent more time living in an ashram. In 1965 he married an actress, Kathrine Jones. From 1965 to 1983 Rio lectured on Indian philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. In 1988 he received the Nested International Prize for Literature.

R. K. Laxman

R. K. Laxman was born (1920) in Mysore in a Tamil family, in the state of Karnataka. His father was a headmaster and Laxman is the youngest of six boys.[2] One of his elder brothers, R.K. Narayan, went on to become one of India's best known English language novelists.
Laxman was the captain of his local "Rough and Tough and Jolly" cricket team and his antics inspired the stories "Dodu the money maker" and "The Regal Cricket Club" written by his brother, Narayan Laxman's idyllic childhood was shaken for a while when his father suffered a paralytic stroke and died around a year later, but the elders at home bore most of the increased responsibility, while Laxman continued with his schooling.
After high school, Laxman applied to the JJ School of Arts, Bombay hoping to concentrate on his lifelong interests of drawing and painting, but the dean of the school wrote to him that his drawings lacked, "the kind of talent to qualify for enrollment in our institution as a student", and refused admission. He finally graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Mysore. In the meantime he continued his freelance artistic activities and contributed cartoons to Swarajya and an animated film based on the mythological character, Narada.
Laxman's earliest work was for newspapers & magazines such as Swarajya and Blitz. Whilst still at the Maharaja's College, Mysore, he began to illustrate his elder brother R K Narayan's stories in The Hindu, and he drew political cartoons for the local newspapers and for the Swatantra. Laxman also drew cartoons, for the Kannada humour magazine, Koravanji. Incidentally, Koravanji was founded in 1942 by Dr M Shivaram. He was a MBBS doctor, who had a clinic around Majestic area in Bangalore. he started this monthly magazine, dedicating to hilarious/sattiric articles and cartoons. He encouraged Laxman quite a lot. He held a summer job at the Gemini Studios, Madras. His first full-time job was as a political cartoonist for the Free Press Journal. Prominent Shiv Sena politician Bal Thackeray, was also an employee at the newspaper at that time. Laxman later joined The Times of India, beginning a career that has spanned for over fifty years.

Rajeev Balasubramanyam

Rajeev Balasubramanyam was born in 1974 in Lancashire, and originates from Southern India. He is a graduate of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He has had short stories published in a variety of anthologies, including New Writing 12. His first novel, set in India with a 17-year-old unnamed narrator, is entitled In Beautiful Disguises (2000). It won a Betty Trask Award in 1999. He is currently working on a second novel, based on a short story which was originally shortlisted for the 1999 Ian St James Award.

Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England, to parents from India, in 1957, grew up in California and currently lives in Japan. He won a King's Scholarship to Eton and then a Demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where, graduating with a Congratulatory Double First in English, he received the highest marks of any student in the university. He went on to acquire a second Master's degree in literature at Harvard, where he taught literature and writing for two years.
He is the author of eight books: his first, Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), appeared on many lists of the top travel-books of the 20th century, and his second, The Lady and the Monk (1991), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in the category of Current Interest. His first novel, Cuba and the Night (1995), was optioned six times and then bought by Hollywood, and his book The Global Soul (2000) inspired multi-media shows, musical works and websites around the world. In addition, he has written a film-script for Miramax, initiated the Hart House Lecture series at the University of Toronto, helped name an internationally known soft drink and been a Fellow (twice) of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Since 1980 he has also written voluminously for magazines in America, Europe and Asia, publishing regular pieces on literature in The New York Review of Books, on globalism for Harper's and on films and music for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. A contributing editor to Salon, Conde Nast Traveler and Time, he has written essays, book and TV reviews and cover-stories on every continent for Time.
In 1995 Iyer was named by the Utne Reader, along with the likes of Noam Chomsky and Vaclav Havel, as one of 100 visionaries worldwide who could change your life. His collection of travel writing, Sun After Dark, was published by Bloomsbury in January 2005.
Pico Iyer has been engaged in conversation with the Dalai Lama (a friend of his father’s) for the last three decades—a continuing exploration of his message and its effectiveness. Now, in The Open Road, Iyer captures the paradoxes of the Dalai Lama’s position: though he has brought the ideas of Tibet to world attention, Tibet itself is being remade as a Chinese province; though he was born in one of the most remote, least developed places on earth, he has become a champion of globalism and technology. He is a religious leader who warns against being needlessly distracted by religion; a Tibetan head of state who suggests that exile from Tibet can be an opportunity; an incarnation of a Tibetan god who stresses his everyday humanity. Moving from Dharamsala, India—the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile—to Lhasa, Tibet, to venues in the West where the Dalai Lama’s pragmatism, rigour, and scholarship are sometimes lost on an audience yearning for mystical visions, The Open Road illuminates the hidden life, the transforming ideas, and the daily challenges of a global icon.

Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969. He graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce from the Allahabad University before completing his MA in English Literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He wrote his first novel when he was only seventeen years old, and two further novels followed, although none have been published.
In 1992, he moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. His first book was Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), a travelogue which described the social and cultural changes in India in the new context of globalization. (Picador will publish a new and revised edition of Butter Chicken in Ludhiana in the UK and India in late 2006.) His novel The Romantics (2000) an ironic tale of people longing for fulfillment in cultures other than their own, was published in eleven European languages and won the Los Angles Times' Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. His recent book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004), a New York Times notable book, mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha's relevance to contemporary times. His most recent book, Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond, describes Mishra's travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia. Like his previous books, it was featured in the New York Times' 100 Best Books of the Year.
In 2005, Mishra published an anthology of writing on India titled India in Mind (Vintage). His writings have been anthologized in The Picador Book of Journeys (2000), The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (2004), and Away: The Indian Writer as Expatriate (Penguin), among other titles. He has introduced new editions of Rudyard Kipling's Kim (Modern Library), E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (Penguin Classics), J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur (NYRB Classics), Gandhi's The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Penguin)  and R. K. Narayan's The Ramayana (Penguin Classics). He has also introduced two volumes of V.S. Naipaul's essays, The Writer and the World and Literary Occasions.
Mishra writes literary and political essays for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and the New Statesman, among other American, British, and Indian publications. His work has also appeared in the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Financial Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Time, The Independent, Granta, The Nation, N+1, Poetry, Common Knowledge, Outlook, Travel & Leisure, The New Yorker, and Harper's.  He was a visiting professor at Wellesley College in 2001, 2004, and 2006. In 2004-2005 he received a fellowship at the Cullmen Center for Writers and Scholars, New York Public Library. He divides his time between London and India, and is presently working on a novel. He is represented by the literary agency Gillon Aitken Associates.

Nirad C. Chaudhuri

Nirad C. Chaudhuri was India's most distinguished writer of English prose in the 20th century. He was also perhaps his country's most controversial commentator since Independence: a lonely position he never regretted, maintained with real courage and indeed grew to relish. Throughout his immensely long life, which began in Bengal in the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, the physically diminutive Chaudhuri was fiercely independent of received opinion; his energy, analytical power and impatience with cant were the antithesis of the oriental stereotypes he confronted in his dozen or so books in English and Bengali.
His first and justifiably most famous book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, a memoir of his childhood and youth, was described by V.S. Naipaul as "maybe the one great book to have come out of the Indo-British encounter" (thus dismissing Kipling and Forster). Its much-quoted dedication page shows how deliberate was Chaudhuri's occidental orientation and how he loved to provoke. It read: "To the memory of the British Empire in India which conferred subjecthood on us but withheld citizenship; to which yet every one of us threw out the challenge: `Civis Britannicus sum' because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule."
Published in London in 1951, when India was in its first flush of freedom, the book infuriated many Indians, particularly the official class. "The wogs took the bait and having read only the dedication sent up a howl of protest," commented Chaudhuri's friend, the editor, historian and novelist Khushwant Singh. Chaudhuri was effectively forced out of government service, deprived of his pension and virtually blacklisted as a writer in India for some years. (Ironically, in the book's latest, 1998 edition, the dedication page was simply omitted by the publisher, without the knowledge of the author.)
But as more thoughtful Indian readers realised even in the 1950s, and especially later, the Autobiography is actually a heartfelt, often wonderfully lyrical pleading on behalf of the best in Bengal: anti- nationalistic, but patriotic in the manner of, say, Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country. Chaudhuri's restless intelligence and extraordinarily wide learning in Bengali, Sanskrit and European (notably British and French) culture, could not allow him to fudge his growing conviction that Indians, particularly Bengalis, were failing to maintain the intellectual and moral standards set by their predecessors in the 19th century, and that independent India was heading for disaster.
In Delhi, during the 1947 Partition, Chaudhuri had witnessed the riots, and the memory had seared his mind. "Political independence arrived for the Indian people on 15 August 1947. For a whole year before that they were engaged in making a red carpet for it to step on. It was dyed in the blood of hundreds of thousands of Indians who perished in the mass murders committed by the Hindus, the Muslims and Sikhs on one another," he wrote.
Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri was born a Hindu in 1897 in a small town in riverine East Bengal (now Bangladesh), where he was surrounded by religious rituals. His father, a lawyer of considerable breadth of mind, was however distinctly unorthodox, and by the time Nirad was in his late teens, he had freed his mind from orthodox Hindu beliefs and developed a passion for England and English literature (though he was almost 60 before he visited Britain). But this early religious immersion would enable him to write, when he was 80, his iconoclastic Hinduism (1979) - a book disliked by scholars but arguably the most personally informed, accessible and honest summary of that multifarious religion.
Like most Bengalis of his time, Chaudhuri moved to Calcutta for his higher education, but soon found himself incapable of the sustained application required for a university degree; he failed to achieve the brilliant result he deserved. Instead he drifted into unsuitable work as a government clerk, followed by editorial attachments to leading Calcutta magazines, and marriage.
These were years of penury and reflection that he recounts compellingly in his second, monumental volume of autobiography, Thy Hand, Great Anarch! (1987), published in his 90th year. What little money he had, he spent on books - including luxury editions - and on western classical recordings, becoming one of the first Bengalis to appreciate such music seriously.
At last, aged 39, he was appointed for four turbulent years, 1937-41, as secretary to a well-known Bengali politician, the elder brother of Subhas Chandra Bose who led the Indian National Army against the British in the Second World War (soldiers despised by Chaudhuri, who was an avid military historian, as turncoats and incompetent tacticians).
Here he enjoyed a ringside seat from where he could observe the maneouverings of Indian National Congress politicians before they obtained absolute power in 1947, and it set the seal on his antipathy for Indian nationalism and for some aspects of Gandhi. This did not prevent him, though, from swallowing his reservations and writing a mainly flattering, if premature obituary of the fasting Mahatma in 1943 while working for All India Radio in New Delhi - where he had recently shifted with his long-suffering, devoted wife Amiya and young family, abandoning Calcutta physically, though never mentally, for ever.
Gandhi survived, but his obituary, Chaudhuri discovered, had not survived the scrutiny of his Indian superiors who had deleted all the laudatory references. Five years later, after Independence, when Gandhi was assassinated, the obituary was finally broadcast - now with the deleted passages restored by the very same officials.
One can understand the contempt aroused in Chaudhuri by many such incidents, which he expressed in his prize-winning The Continent of Circe (1965). From the 1950s, and especially after 1970, when he and his wife settled in Oxford, he increasingly turned his fire upon modern Britain too, always with wit and sometimes with accuracy, in articles for British newspapers and periodicals, and asides in books such as A Passage to England (1959) and Clive of India (1975). Not that earlier he had endorsed the bulk of British policies and racial behaviour in India - as opposed to the beneficent influence of British (and other European) literature and thought - but the post-war British struck him as going rapidly and willingly into decline.
Au fond Chaudhuri was radically out of sympathy with the century in which he was destined to live. That was both his strength and his weakness; and the source of his uniqueness and contradictions. It was wholly characteristic of him that (like Gandhi) he rejected the technological art form invented in his lifetime, the cinema, in which one of the greatest artists was a fellow Bengali, Satyajit Ray. While respecting Ray personally, Chaudhuri was critical of the few Ray films he admitted to having seen. Probably he sensed that their sophistication and humanity might undermine his own brilliantly constructed vision of Bengal's descent into anarchy.
In 1990, following Ray and that greatest of Bengalis, Rabindranath Tagore, Chaudhuri was happy to be awarded an honorary doctorate from Oxford University; and in 1992, he was delighted to be appointed an honorary CBE. He hardly ceased to write, despite failing eyesight - producing a slim and provocative polemic in English at the age of 100 (Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse, 1997) - and never stopped talking, often scintillatingly, always with the vigour of someone a third his age. To hear him recite from memory lengthy extracts from his favourite writers in Bengali, Sanskrit and English was a moving (and shaming) experience.
His final work in Bengali was a last effort to alert Bengalis to the real worth of Tagore, a giant writer and human being for Chaudhuri whom, he said with satirical truth, Bengalis were treating as "the holy mascot of Bengali provincial vanity". Like Tagore, Chaudhuri never quite lost the desire to appeal to his countrymen: he was always, as he once gleefully told me, a bestseller among those who most reviled him.

Mitra Phukan

Mitra Phukan is a well-known Assamese writer and contributes regularly to prominent English dailies in Assam. She is the author of a number of books for children and has recently edited a collection of Assamese short stories. She is a committed member of the North East Writers' Forum and edites their journal, NEWFrontiers.

M. G. Vassanji

M. G. Vassanji is not an author who is easily labelled. He is of South Asian descent and was born in Nairobi, Kenya where he lived until the death of his father. His family then moved to the community of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Vassanji left Dar es Salaam in 1970 to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, investing many years in his career as a physicist. In 1978 he came to Canada and began work at the Chalk River power station. Two years later he became a research associate and lecturer at the University of Toronto. He was reluctant to take his passion for writing as a serious career alternative until he published his first novel, The Gunny Sack, in 1989 and won the 1990 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book in the African region.
Vassanji's novels and short stories draw on his experiences and sense of community and are peopled with the old and young, traditional and modern, and the assimilated and displaced. Thematically, his fiction attempts to connect the past and the present, assimilate traditional and contemporary values, and balance a sense of community with an individual's struggle to belong.
Vassanji is the founder of the Toronto South Asian Review, a nonprofit organization that supports South Asian Canadian writers. He is the editor of their journal, The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad (formerly The Toronto South Asian Review) and contributes his short stories to anthologies and other collections on behalf of the organization.

Meira Chand

Meira Chand was born and educated in London. Her mother is Swiss and her father is Indian. She trained as a textile designer and married an Indian businessman before moving to Japan in 1962.

Meera Syal

Meera syal was born in 1963 near Wolverhampton in the West Midlands and was educated at Manchester University where she read English and Drama. She co-wrote the script for 'My Sister Wife', a three-part BBC Television series, and wrote the film Bhaji on the Beach for Channel 4. She co-writes and is a cast member of the popular BBC Television comedy series 'Goodness Gracious Me' and The Kumars at No. 42'. She also works as a journalist and is a regular contributor to The Guardian.
Meera Syal's childhood experiences growing up in a small mining community provided the background to her first novel, Anita and Me (1996). The novel was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and won a Betty Trask Award. It tells the story of Meena Kumar, a young Asian girl struggling to accommodate the opposing influences of her white schoolfriends and her traditional Punjabi background. Syal's second novel, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999), narrates the adventures of three young Asian women growing up in Britain.
Meera Syal was awarded an MBE in 1997 and won the 'Media Personality of the Year' award at the Commission for Racial Equality's annual 'Race in the Media' awards (2000), as well as the EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award) for Media Personality of the Year in 2001.
Bibliography
Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers (includes My Sister Wife by Meera Syal) Aurora Metro Publications, 1995
Anita and Me Flamingo, 1996
Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee Doubleday, 1999
Prizes and awards
1996 Betty Trask Award Anita and Me
1996 Guardian Fiction Prize (shortlist) Anita and Me
1997 MBE
2000 Commission for Racial Equality Race in the Media Personality of the Year Award (Commission for Racial Equality 'Race in the Media' awards)
2001 EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award) for Media Personality of the Year

Meena Alexander

Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad in India in 1951 to a family of Syrian Christians. As a very young child she moved back and forth between Allahabad in the North and Kerala on the South west coast, where her parents came from. When she was five, her father started to work in Sudan and she travelled by boat, with her mother, to join him.
As a girl in India, Alexander was often expected to conform to traditional ways. In the Sudan she received an English education, and went on to study English at Khartoum University aged only thirteen. There she wrote her first poems in English which were translated into Arabic and published in a local newspaper. At eighteen she travelled to England to study for a PhD and then returned to India to teach at universities.
She began to write and publish her poetry. She met and fell in love with an American and within three weeks of meeting they decided to marry. In 1979 she moved once again, this time to live and work in the United States with her husband. She's now a Professor, living in Manhattan and has two children. She's continued to write poetry and prose and was only forty two when she wrote Fault Lines, her autobiography, in which she traces her growth as a writer and a woman.

Manoj Das

Manoj Das was Born in a coastal village of Orissa in 1934, Manoj Das grew up amidst Nature's splendour. But he also experienced its fury when a cyclone devastated his area, followed by a famine and an epidemic that killed thousands of people. Added to that, his affluent house was twice plundered by dacoits while Manoj, aged six then, looked on with disbelief. Such ups and downs in life probably enriched his creative mind at its formative stage. And by the time he was in high school, he had already published many works in his mother tongue, Oriya. He taught English in a college at Cuttack before he came over to Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry in 1963, where he continues to be a professor at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. He started writing in English in the late 1950s and today he can probably be called the foremost bilingual writer in India. Why did he start writing in English? He said, "... At one stage, I felt inspired to write in English because I was haunted by the feeling that much of the Indian fiction in English that claimed to project the Indian life and situation was not doing justice to its claim. I thought born in a village just before Independence and hence living through the transition at an impressionable age, I could present through English, a chunk of genuine India".
He has received many awards including the Padma Shree, Sahitya Akademi Award and the Saraswati Samman. Some years ago, he was given the annual BAPASI Award by the Booksellers and Publishers Association of South India.Does he feel at home in Pondicherry? He feels he is an Indian first, wherever he is. He has lived in Pondicherry for more than four decades. He loves its ambience and has great regard for its people.Manoj Das is a formidable influence on contemporary Oriya literature. But outside Orissa, he is better known as an Indo-Anglian writer. Which of the two aspects of his literary personality would he wish to be remembered for? "That does not depend on my choice," he said and continued, "I have a wide readership in Orissa. In English I have a trusted and serious readership, but numerically smaller. If the quality of my writing matters, both the streams of my contribution should prove lasting in their own rights."
Through his nearly 300 short stories, Manoj Das had brought about an awareness about the rural Indian life. He has been a crusader against the invasion of India's intellectual climate by decadent values. He has stressed the divinity and psychic splendour inherent in man. No wonder, he has among his admirers celebrities such as Graham Greene, Keating, Dr. K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar and so many academics in the Western world.

Kunal Basu

Kunal Basu was born in Calcutta. Educated in India and the United States, he has lived in many countries. A Professor of Marketing, he has taught at McGill University, Canada and at Oxford University, England. He is the author of three acclaimed novels: The Opium Clerk based on 19th century's opium trade, The Miniaturist set in Mughal India, and most recently, Racists , which delves into the world of Victorian racial science. He speaks frequently at literary festivals, and critical commentary of his work has appeared in Romancing the Strange: The Fiction of Kunal Basu , published by the Shakespeare Society of India. He is married with one daughter.

Kiran Nagarkar

Kiran Nagarkar (b. 1942) was born in Mumbai and studied at the University of Bombay.
Kiran Nagarkar is a bilingual writer with a difference. He wrote his first novel in Marathi, though he had not written in it before. After that, he moved to writing in English, but translated his second novel Ravan and Eddie back into Marathi.
His creativity and storytelling come to the fore in Cuckold , a fictio-historical account of 15th century Mewar (Rajasthan). His pacy writing makes even profound philosophical concepts lucid.

Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971, and educated in India, England and the United States. She is the daughter of Anita Desai, and now travels between the three countries, and says she feels 'no alienation or dislocation'. She spent four years writing her first novel, and says it is not at all autobiographical. An excerpt was featured in the New Yorker India Fiction issue, and in Mirrorwork, Salman Rushdie's controversial anthology of 50 years of Indian writing. She is currently a student in Columbia University's creative writing course.
Bibliography
The Inheritance of Loss
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006
In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge's cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are claimed by his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. When an Indian-Nepali insurgency in the mountains interrupts Sai's exploration of the many incarnations and facets of a romance with her Nepali tutor, and causes their lives to descend into chaos, they are forced to consider their colliding interests.
In a generous vision, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, Desai presents the human quandaries facing a panoply of characters. This majestic novel of a busy, grasping time -- every moment holding out the possibility of hope or betrayal -- illuminates the consequences of colonialism and global conflicts of religion, race, and nationality. Sawnet Review by Champa Bilwakesh
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
Faber and Faber, London. 1998.

Keshav Malik

Keshav Malik was born on 5 November 1924 in Miani (Punjab) Pakistan. He is an Indian poet, critic, arts scholar, and curator.
Malik graduated from Amar Singh College in Srinagar, Kashmir in 1945. From 1947-48, he was a personal assistant to Jawaharlal Nehru. During the 1950s, Malik studied Renaissance art in Florence, French at the Sorbonne, and attended lectures at Columbia University.
From 1960-72, Malik was art critic for The Hindustan Times. During roughly the same period, he was literary editor of "Thoughts," an Indian journal of the arts. In 1973-74, Malik was curator for "The Human Condition," an exhibition of contemporary Indian art that traveled to Bulgaria, Poland, Belgium, and Yugoslavia. From 1978-2000, Malik was art critic for The Times of India.
Malik has published ten volumes of poetry, including "The Lake Surface and Other Poems", "Storm Warning," and "Between Nobodies and Stars." He has also edited six anthologies of English translations of Indian poetry, and is a frequent lecturer and seminar participant. He co-founded the Poetry Society of India and is currently president of the Poetry Club of India.
Malik was awarded the Padma Shri for literature in 1991. He is the brother of arts scholar Kapila Vatsyayan.

Keki Daruwalla

Keki N Daruwalla was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan. His education was at Ludhiana. He joined the Indian Police Service in 1958 and, on retirement, he lives in Delhi. A recipient of Sahitya Akademi Award (1984) and Commonwealth Poetry Award, Keki N. Daruwalla has published several books, consisting of mostly poems and a couple of fictional works.
His works of poetry include Under Orion (1970), Apparition in April (1971), Crossing of Rivers (1976), Winter Poems (1980), The Keeper of the Dead (1982), Landscapes (1987), A Summer of Tigers (1995), Night River (2000) and The Map-maker (2002). Swords and Abyss (1979) and The Minister for Permanent Unrest & Other Stories (1996) are his works of fiction. He also edited Two Decades of Indian Poetry. The Library of Congress has all his books.

Kamala Markandaya

Kamala Markandaya was born in 1924. He was a pseudonym used by Kamala Purnaiya Taylor, an Indian novelist and journalist. A native of Mysore, India, Markandaya was a graduate of Madras University, and afterwards published several short stories in Indian newspapers. After India declared its independence, Markandaya moved to Britain, though she still labeled herself an Indian expatriate long afterwards.
Known for writing about culture clash between Indian urban and rural societies, Markandaya's first published novel, Nectar in a Sieve, was a bestseller and named a noteable book of 1955 by the American Library Association. Other novels include A Silence of Desire, A Handful of Rice, The Nowhere Man, Two Virgins, The Golden Honeycomb, and Pleasure City. Markandaya died in London on May 16, 2004.

Kamala Das

Kamala Das was born on March 31, 1934 in Malabar in Kerala, India. She is the daughter of V.M. Nair, a former managing editor of the widely-circulated Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi, and Nalappatt Balamani Amma, a renowned Malayali poetess. In 1984, she was short-listed for the Nobel Prize for Literature along with Marguerite Yourcenar, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer. Kamala Das is probably the first Hindu woman to openly and honestly talk about sexual desires of Indian woman, which made her an iconoclast of her generation.
Kamala Das, is a well-known female Indian writer writing in English as well as Malayalam, her native language. She is considered one of the outstanding Indian poets writing in English, although her popularity in Kerala is based chiefly on her short stories and autobiography. Much of her writing in Malayalam came under the pen name Madhavikkutty

Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London, England in July 1967, and brought up in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Her parents, a teacher and a librarian, taught her about her Bengali heritage from an early age. Lahiri received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989. She then received multiple degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English, an M.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Literature and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She took up a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997-1998).
In 2001, she married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then Deputy Editor of Time Latin America. Lahiri currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. She has been a Vice President of the PEN American Center since 2005.

Indu Sundaresan

Indu Sundaresan is an American author. She was born and raised in India, and migrated to the United States for graduate school. Trained as an economist, her short fiction has appeared in The Vincent Brothers Review and on iVillage.com. She lives in the Seattle, Washington area.
One of the novels Indu Sundaresan has written is The Twenthieth Wife which is about how a girl named Mehrunissa becomes Empress of the Mughal Empire. Another is The Feast of Roses, the sequel to The Twentieth Wife.

Imtiaz Dharker

Imtiaz Dharker' is a Pakistani-British poet and documentary film-maker. She was born in Lahore in 1954 to Pakistani parents, but she was brought up in Glasgow where her family moved to during her teens. She currently lives in Mumbai with her Hindu husband, but spends time in London also.[1] She has written three books of poetry, conceived as sequences of poems and drawings. The main themes of her poetry are home, freedom, journeys, geographical and cultural displacement, communal conflict and gender politics.
She is a prescribed poet on the AQA GCSE English syllabus. Her poems 'Blessing' and 'This Room' are in AQA Anthology, Different Cultures, Cluster 1 and 2 respectively.
She is also an artist and documentary-maker. In 1980, she won an award for a short film.

Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru was Born in 1969. He is the British author of The Impressionist and Transmission. Of mixed English and Kashmiri Pandit ancestry, he grew up in Essex. He studied English at Wadham College, Oxford University, then gained an MA in Philosophy and Literature from Warwick University.
He has worked as a travel journalist since 1998, writing for such newspapers as The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, and was travel correspondent for Time Out magazine. In 1999 he was named The Observer Young Travel Writer of the Year. From 1999-2004 he was also music editor of Wallpaper* magazine and since 1995 he has been a contributing editor to Mute, the culture and technology magazine. He won the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award for The Impressionist. Transmission, his second novel, was published in the summer of 2004. In 2005 he published the short story collection "Noise".
In 2003, Hari Kunzru was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'. Although he was also awarded The John Llewellyn Rhys prize for writers under 35, the second oldest literary prize in the UK, he turned it down on the grounds that it was backed by the Mail on Sunday whose "hostility towards black and Asian people" he felt was unacceptable. In a statement read out on his behalf, he stated "As the child of an immigrant, I am only too aware of the poisonous effect of the Mail's editorial line.... The atmosphere of prejudice it fosters translates into violence, and I have no wish to profit from it." He further went on to recommend that the award money be donated to the charity Refugee Council (UK). He sits on the executive of English PEN.
Visit His Personal Website www.harikunzru.com

Gurcharan Das

Gurcharan Das was Born in 1946 at Lyallpur in Pakistan, Das spent the better half of his childhood in New York as his father was posted there. He graduated with honors from Harvard University in Philosophy and Politics. He later attended Harvard Business School (AMP), where he is featured in three case studies.
He was CEO of Procter & Gamble India and Vice President or Procter & Gamble Far East between 1985 and 1992. He was later Vice President and Managing Director, Procter & Gamble Worldwide. Prior to P&G, he was Chairman and Managing Director of Richardson Hindustan Limited from 1981 to 1985, the company where he started as a trainee. Having chalked out his life graph, he quit at the age of 50.

Gita Mehta

Gita Mehta was born in Delhi in 1943 to a family extremely active in the struggles for Indian liberation from Britain. She is the daughter of Biju Patnaik, a famous Indian freedom fighter who later became the major political leader of the Eastern state of Orissa. At her birth, Mehta's grandmother demanded that she be named Joan of Arc, as a child born into a community of freedom fighters who were often forced to go underground as a result of their political actions. But instead, she was named Gita (translated "song"), as in song of freedom. Only several weeks after Mehta's birth, her father was imprisoned for his political activity. Growing up, she was surrounded by her parent's active struggle for Indian liberation. At the age of three, she and her brother were sent to a boarding school while her mother followed her father from one jail to the next.
Mehta was educated in India and the United Kingdom. While attending Cambridge University, she met fellow student Ajai Singh Mehta. The two married and have one son. Mehta and her husband "Sonny," the president of Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, currently maintain residences in New York, London and Delhi, spending at least three months of every year in India. As a result of Sonny Mehta's prominent position in New York's publishing industry, the couple are a central figure in New York's literary publishing world.

Eunice de Souza

Eunice de Souza was born in Pune, India in 1940, and educated there. She received an MA from Marquette University in Wisconsin and a PhD from Bombay in 1988. She is now a lecturer in English in St Xavier's College, Bombay. Apart from writing extensively on contemporary literature and culture, she has written four books for children, and was the co-editor of Statements (1976), an anthology of Indian prose in English. Her collections of verse are Fix (1979), Women in Dutch Painting (1988), and Ways of Belonging: New and Selected Poems (1990); the last of these was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Dom Moraes

Dom Moraes was born was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) to Beryl and Frank Moraes, former editor of Indian Express. He published nearly 30 books. He spent eight years in Britain, living in London and Oxford (where he studied at the university and was a member of Jesus College), but spent most of his life in Mumbai, a city he detested. He married the Indian actress Leela Naidu and then separated from her.He had a life long battle with alcoholism.
He edited magazines in London, Hong Kong and New York. He became the editor of The Asia Magazine in 1971. He scripted and partially directed over 20 television documentaries for the BBC and ITV. He was a war correspondent in Algeria, Israel and Vietnam. In 1976 he joined the United Nations.
Dom Moraes was an alumnus of St. Mary's High School(ISC), Mazagoan, Mumbai.Moraes conducted one of the first interviews of the Dalai Lama after the Tibetan spiritual leader fled to India in 1959. The Dalai Lama was then 23 and Moraes was 20.He ended his writing career writing books in collaboration with Sarayu Srivatsa.

Dilip Chitre

Dilip Chitre was born in 1938 in Baroda, Gujarat, India. He is a poet, translator, painter, filmmaker and editor. His collected Marathi poems published in three volumes--- Ekoon Kavita--I, II, and III— contain all of his published and unpublished poems since 1954. He has a collection of short stories, a collection of four novellas, four collections of essays, one volume of critical writings, and two plays among his Marathi opus. He has published an anthology of contemporary Marathi poetry in translation.
His other books of translations include: Says Tuka (Penguin), Anubhavamrut (Sahitya Akademi), and Virus Alert. His English poetry books and chapbooks are: Travelling in a Cage, Ambulance Ride, The Mountain, and No Moon Monday at the River Karha.. His English poems are included in every major anthology of Indian poetry, including, most recently, Post Climactic Love Poem (Aark Arts). He has won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Ekoon Kavita-I and the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize for Says Tuka.
He was a Fellow of the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa and a writer-in-residence at the Villa Waldberta, Munich. His feature film, Godam, won the Jury's Special Prize at the Festival des Trois Continents, Nantes, France. He is the editor of New Quest , A Quarterly Journal of Participative Inquiry. Chitre lives with his wife Viju in Pune, Maharashtra.

David Davidar

David Davidar (b. 1959) was born in Kerala into a military family. He is a graduate of Madras University. In his mid-twenties, he moved to Bombay to pursue journalism, before changing over to publishing. He completed a course in publishing from Radcliffe/Harvard. David Davidar is best known as the head of Penguin India, who turned around its publishing program from a mere six titles in 1987 to 150 titles annually. In 2004, he relocated to Penguin Canada and is now based in Toronto.The House of Blue Mangoes is his debut novel, a voluminous work chronicling multiple generations set in deep southern India.
His Work
The House of Blue Mangoes
The House of Blue Mangoes is sweeping, epic and an ambitious tome which chronicles three generations of the Dorai clan. It covers the period 1899-1947, a momentous period that witnessed the fall of the British Raj, the turmoil of caste wars, the rise of Gandhi, and the culmination of independence.
The story focuses on the Dorai men, and the inescapable conflicts between father and son that tragically play out each generation, from Solomon to Daniel to Kannan. Passionate affairs, assassinations, caste wars, and household acrimony are inextricably linked to the Dorai family home—the house of blue mangoes of the title—in the seaside village of Chevathar. No matter how far members of the clan may travel, they are always drawn back to their ancestral land.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni was born Calcutta and spent the first nineteen years of her life in India. She moved to the United States to continue her studies, getting a Master's degree from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, both in English. For several years she has been interested in issues involving women, and has worked with Afghani women refugees and women from dysfunctional families, as well as in shelters for battered women. Since 1991 she has been president of MAITRI, a South Asian women's service which she helped found in the San Francisco area. She has written several books of poetry, and her work has been included in over 30 anthologies. Her book of short stories, Arranged Marriage, which has won critical acclaim and the 1996 American Book Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers and PEN Oakland awards for fiction. She has two published novels: The Mistress of Spices and Sister of my Heart.

Chetan Bhagat

Chetan Bhagat was born on born 22 April 1974. He studied at The Army Public School, Delhi (1978-1991) and graduated from IIT Delhi (1991-1995). He completed his post-graduate studies from IIM Ahmedabad (1995-1997). At IIM Ahmedabad, he received a medal for the 'best outgoing student award'. He has been working in Hong Kong with Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, since 1999.
His first novel Five Point Someone relives his own days in IIT through the light-hearted story of three IITians who do not live up to others’ academic expectations. The book, with its humorous narrative and contemporary Indian student argot, achieved a sort of cult popularity and has topped national bestseller lists.
Chetan Bhagat won the Society Young Achiever’s award in 2004 and the Publisher’s recognition award in 2005.

Cauvery Madhavan

Cauvery Madhavan (b.l962) was born and educated in India. As an army officer's daughter she attended ten schools, always run by nuns, and retains an abiding horror of needlework. She graduated with a First in Economics from Stella Maris College, University of Madras and then worked in a variety of marketing jobs. She got her first taste of writing whilst working at an ad agency. Cauvery married her childhood sweetheart, a newly qualified doctor and moved to Ireland in 1987 arriving on St. Valentine's Day. Despite the Irish weather she has been in love with the country ever since. A keen cook, she now lives with her husband and three children in County Kildare.

Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee was born on July 27, 1940, to an upper-middle class Hindu Brahmin family in Calcutta, India. The second of three daughters of Sudhir Lal, a chemist, and Bina (Banerjee) Mukherjee, she lived with 40 or 50 relatives until the age of eight. Born into an extraordinarily close-knit and intelligent family, Mukherjee and her sisters were always given ample academic opportunities, and thus have all pursued academic endeavors in their careers and have had the opportunity to receive excellent schooling. In 1947, her father was given a job in England and he brought his family to live there until 1951, which gave Mukherjee an opportunity to develop and perfect her English language skills.
Mukherjee earned a B.A. with honors from the University of Calcutta in 1959. She and her family then moved to Baroda, India, where she studied for her Master's Degree in English and Ancient Indian Culture, which she acquired in 1961. Having planned to be a writer since childhood, Mukherjee went to the University of Iowa in 1961 to attend the prestigious Writer's Workshop. She planned to study there to earn her Master's of Fine Arts, then return to India to marry a bridegroom of her father's choosing in her class and caste.
Finally fed up with Canada, Mukherjee and her family moved to the United States in 1980, where she was sworn in as a permanent U.S. resident. Continuing to write, in 1986 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant. After holding several posts at various colleges and universities, she ultimately settled in 1989 at the University of California-Berkeley. Because of the distinctly different experiences she has had throughout life, she has been described as a writer who has lived through several phases of life. First, as a colonial, then National subject in India. She then led a life of exile as a post-colonial Indian in Canada. Finally, she shifted into a celebratory mode as an immigrant, then citizen, in the United States. She now fuses her several lives and backgrounds together with the intention of creating a "new immigrant" literature.
Bibliography
Desirable Daughters (2002)
The Holder of the World (1993)
Jasmine (1989)
The Middleman and Other Stories (1988)
"Immigrant Writing: Give Us Your Maximalists!" New York Times Book Review (28 August 1988), 28-29.
The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy, with Clark Blaise (1987)
Days and Nights in Calcutta, with Clark Blaise (1986)
Darkness (1985)
Wife (1975)
The Tiger's Daughter (1971)

Balaji Venkateswaran

Balaji Venkateswaran grew up in India and moved to the US to earn his master's degree. He is an engineer by training and manages engineering operations for a software company in the San Francisco Bay area, where he lives with his wife and two children. His stories and book reviews have appeared in Himal, India West, Indian Review of Books, Weber Studies, India Currents, etc. Rage is his first novel.

Ashok Banker

Ashok Kumar Banker (born 1964) is a novelist and short story writer born and living in Mumbai, India. He has written professionally since his early teens, and has worked as a print journalist, columnist, scriptwriter for television series and documentaries, and in advertising.
Banker has published in several genres, ranging from contemporary fiction about urban life in India to multi-volume mythological epics, as well as science fiction, fantasy, and cross-genre works. His first three novels to be published were crime thrillers, claimed to be the first written by an Indian novelist in English. They gained him widespread attention and a reputation for being a crime novelist that has clung to him despite his not having written crime novels since [1], though he has written short crime fiction, some of which involves characters from the novels [2]. The stories of his "Devi" series are short works featuring avatars of the Hindu goddess Devi, and have appeared in various science fiction, fantasy, and horror magazines.
Bibliography
The Ramayana series:
The Prince of Ayodhya (2003)
Siege of Mithila (2003)
Demons of Chitrakut (2004)
Armies of Hanuman (2005)
Bridge of Rama (2005)
King of Ayodhya (2006)

The Mahabharata series:
The Seeds of War (2006)
His other novels include:
The Iron Bra (1993)
Murder & Champagne (1993)
Ten Dead Admen (1993)
Vertigo (1993)
Byculla Boy (1994)
The Missing Parents Mystery (1994)
Beautiful Ugly (forthcoming)

Anurag Mathur

Anurag Mathur was born in Delhi and educated at Scindia School, Gwalior, St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA. He is a journalist in the print and electronic media and loves reading, music, eating out and tennis. His published books include the best-selling novels The Inscrutable Americans and Making the Minister Smile.

Anjana Appachana

Anjana Appachana was born in India, received her education and also worked there for a few years before moving to USA. She has degrees from Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and in Creative Writing from Pennsylvania State Univeristy.
One of her short stories Sharmaji was included in the anthology on 50 years of Indian writing (by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West). Her focus, as evinced by the theme of her novel Listening Now is the experience of the ordinary Indian woman: her dreams and passions frustrated and realised, through and in spite of the mundane, repetitive and domestic pattern of her life.
Anjana Appachana is the recipient of an O. Henry Festival Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowship. She lives in Tempe, Arizona.

ANJALI BANERJEE

Anjali Banerjee was born in India, raised in Canada and California. She has written five novels for youngsters and four novels for adults. Her novels for young adults, Maya Running and Looking for Bapu has received much critical acclaim. In this interview, she tells us about her writer superstitions, writing as an Indian not living in India and much more.
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.
Anjali Banerjee lives in Oxford with her husband and two daughters.

Anita Rau Badami

Anita Rau Badami was born in 1961, in the town of Rourkela in ,Orissa, India. Her father, a mechanical engineer who designed trains, was transferred every two or three years, so that she had a mobile childhood. She grew up in a household where English was the primary language spoken and attended Catholic schools in India, because, as she explains, until around twenty years ago, these were the good schools in India .
At age 18, Anita Rau Badami borrowed money from her father to buy novels at a book fair in Chennai, India. To pay him back she took her first writing assignment, an article in a local newspaper, and earned 75 rupees. She holds degrees in Communication Media, English Literature, and Journalism from universities in Bombay and Madras. Badami began her career as a freelance writer in India with regular features in The Hindu, The Deccan Herald, and Indian Express.
She worked as a copywriter for advertising agencies in Bombay, Bangalore and Madras, and wrote stories for children's magazines. She married in 1984, had a son in 1987, and moved to Calgary in 1991. In 1995, she graduated from the University of Calgary where she received an M.A. degree in English. She submitted her first work to Penguin Books. Penguin published her work, and soon Badami was touring North America, reading from her best-selling debut novel Tamarind Mem.
Several of her short stories appeared in Canadian literary journals such as The Malahat Review, Event, Toronto Review of Contemporary Fiction among others. The Hero’s Walk was the winner of the Marian Engel Award for excellence in fiction for a body of work; a Finalist in the 2000 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize for fiction; and on the longlist for the 2002 Orange Prize for Fiction.
The Hero's Walk was nominated for the 2002 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The Hero's Walk also won the Commonwealth Best Book Prize in the Canada/ Caribbean region, as well as the Washington Post Best Book of 2001. Ms. Badami has taught writing at University of British Columbia.
Since moving to Montreal two years ago when her husband, Madhav, got a job teaching at McGill University, she has been working quietly on her third novel. A year ago, she received a call from Concordia offering her the position.
It was in Vancouver that she began working on her third novel, Can You Hear the Night Bird Sing, to be published next fall. She has been contacted by her publishers in India and England to republish her children’s stories, and she has had an idea for book number four. The working title is The Guest.

Anita Nair

Anita Nair was born on 26 January 1966, in Kerala, India. A bestselling author of fiction and poetry, her novels The Better Man and Ladies Coupe have been translated in to 21 languages. She was educated in Chennai (Madras) before returning to Kerala, where she gained a BA in English Language and Literature. She lives with her husband and son in Bangalore. Her latest novel Mistress is published by Black Amber, £11.99.

Anita Desai

Anita Desai was born in Mussoorie, a hill station north of Delhi, as the daughter of a D.N. Mazumdar, a Bengali businessman, and the former Toni Nime, of German origin. She grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English at school and in the city streets. She has said that she grew up surrounded by Western literature and music, not realizing until she was older that this was an anomaly in her world where she also learned the Eastern culture and customs. She married a businessman at twenty-one and raised several children before becoming known for her writing. Her first book, Cry,the Peacock was published in England in 1963, and her better known novels include In Custody (1984) and Baumgartner's Bombay (1988). She once wrote: "I see India through my mother's eyes, as an outsider, but my feelings for India are my father's, of someone born here" (Griffiths).
She never considered trying to first publish in India because there was no publisher in India who would be interested in fiction by an Indian writer (Jussawalla) and it was first in England that her work became noticed. U.S. readers were slower to discover her, due, she believes to England's natural interest in India and the U.S.'s lack of comprehension regarding the foreignness of her subject.
But Desai only writes in English. This, she has repeatedly said,was a natural and unconscious choice for her: "I can state definitely that I did not choose English in a deliberate and conscious act and I'd say perhaps it was the language that chose me and I started writing stories in English at the age of seven, and have been doing so for thirty years now without stopping to think why "(Desai).
She is considered the writer who introduced the psychological novel in the tradition of Virginia Woolf to India. Included in this, is her pioneer status of writing of feminist issues. While many people today would not classify her work as feminist, she believes this is due to changing times: "The feminist movement in India is very new and a younger generation of readers in India tends to be rather impatient of my books and to think of them as books about completely helpless women, hopeless women. They find it somewhat unreal that the women don't fight back, but they don't seem to realize how very new this movement is" (Jussawalla).
Also, she says, her writing is realistic: "Women think I am doing a disservice to the feminist movement by writing about women who have no control over their lives. But I was trying, as every writer tries to do, even in fiction, to get at the truth, write the truth. It would have been really fanciful if I had made [for example, in Clear Light of Day] Bim and Tara modern-day feminists "(in Griffiths).
Desai considers Clear Light of Day, her most autobiographical book, because she was writing about her neighborhood in Delhi, although the characters are not based on her brothers and sisters. What she was exploring in this novel, she has said, was the importance of childhood and memories as the source of a life. She had wanted to start the book at the end and move backwards, into the characters' childhood and further, into the childhood of their parents etc., but in the end: "When I had gone as far back as their infancy the book just ground to a halt; it lost its momentum. It told me that this was done, that I couldn't carry it further. But I still have a sense of disappointment about that book, because the intention had been different" (Jussawalla). The character of Raja is identified with her in the sense that he is so immersed in all different types of literature and culture, and is so concerned with protecting the multicultural heritage of India. His worries about the Muslim neighbor family is not just about them particularly, but rather worry about the loss of all that the Muslim culture and literature contributes to India.
While Desai has taught for years at Mount Holyoke and MIT, and spends most of the year outside of India, she does not consider herself part of the Indian Diaspora. Although she does not fit in the Indian box anymore (Griffiths) as she said, she considers herself lucky for having not left India until late in her life, because she feels that she has been drifting away from it ever since: "I can't really write of it with the same intensity and familiarity that I once had." Yet she cannot feel at home in any other place or society (Griffiths).

Amulya Malladi

Amulya Malladi was born and raised in India. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in engineering from Osmania University, Hyderabad, India and received a master's degree in journalism from The University of Memphis, Tennessee, USA.
After living in the United States for several years, Amulya now lives in Copenhagen, Denmark with her husband and two sons.
Amulya's fourth novel, Song of the Cuckoo Bird was released by Ballantine Books on December 27, 2005. She is currently working on her fifth novel, tentatively titled, The Sound of Language, which is set in Denmark.
You can contact Amulya by email at author@amulyamalladi.com

AKHIL SHARMA

AKHIL SHARMA was born in Delhi, India, in 1971. He grew up in Edison, New Jersey.
His stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories anthology, the O. Henry Award Winners anthology, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. He is a winner of The Voice Literary Supplement’s Year 2000 "Writers on the Verge" Award. A portion of An Obedient Father was excerpted in the debut fiction issue of The New Yorker in June 2000.
Sharma lives in New York City, where he is an investment banker at a major Wall Street firm.

Recent reviews...
"Sharma’s sharply realistic fiction effortlessly interweaves one man’s life, one family’s history, and one country’s fate into a compelling debut novel … Sharma allows his fiction to unfold through wonderfully rich details. From Karan’s cajoling of bribes from a school principal to his memories of his childhood in Beri to the minutiae of his sad domestic life with his daughter, the facts of this novel fascinate the reader. Combine this with Karan’s greedy, comic, petty, and ultimately horrifying voice, and the result is a tale that haunts us long after we’ve finished it. A remarkable first novel."
—Booklist, starred review
"A supernova in the galaxy of young, talented Indian writers, Sharma debuts with a bold and shocking novel that casts a mesmerizing spell. Ram Karan is a widower whose widowed daughter, Anita, and eight-year-old granddaughter, Asha, live with him in a tiny apartment in one of Delhi’s poorer sections. Nominally a functionary in the physical education department of the city’s schools, Ram is in fact ‘Mr. Gupta’s moneyman’; that is, he coerces bribes for his boss, who funnels the money to the Congress Party.
At first, Ram’s candid admissions of ‘general incompetence and laziness’ are perversely endearing, but when the real cause of his self-hatred comes to light, the reader’s perceptions begin to change. In a moment of temptation, Ram commits a furtive sexual act with his unwitting granddaughter – and his downfall begins. Twenty years ago, he had repeatedly raped Anita, who now becomes unhinged at the thought that her daughter may be in peril. Anita’s bizarre revenge will result in Ram’s complete degradation; ironically, the repercussions of her obsessive need for disclosure cause even more emotional damage to everyone involved. Concurrent with these personal tragedies and the breakdown of one family, Sharma draws an acid-etched picture of modern Indian society, in which the corrupt political system victimizes all citizens … Sharma’s depiction of a society riddled with graft, violent religious prejudice, male chauvinism and bigoted cultural attitudes is a cautionary tale about what happens to the individual spirit when poverty, superstition, racial tension and general hopelessness are exacerbated by the absence of judicial morality. This caustic yet darkly comic story resonates powerfully, as the reader comes to sympathize with fallible human beings trapped in circumstances that corrupt the soul."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

AMITAVA KUMAR

AMITAVA KUMAR was born in Ara, Bihar, and grew up in the nearby town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty and delicious mangoes.

Kumar’s writings have appeared in The Nation, Harper's, New Statesman, Transition, American Prospect, Toronto Review, Colorlines, Biblio, Outlook, Frontline, India Today, The Hindu, Himal, Herald, The Friday Times, The Times of India, and other publications. He has also been a literary columnist at Tehelka.com.
Kumar is the author of Passport Photos (University of California Press and Penguin-India, 2000) and Bombay-London-New York (Routledge and Penguin-India, forthcoming in 2002). Passport Photos was the winner of an “Outstanding Book of the Year” Award from the Myers Program for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. Kumar is also the scriptwriter and narrator of the prize-winning documentary, Pure Chutney (1997).

He has been awarded a Barach Fellowship at the Wesleyan Writers Festival and a SAJA prize in 2001 for op-ed writing. He has won fellowships from the NEH, Yale University, SUNY-Stony Brook, Dartmouth College, and University of California-Riverside. Kumar is a professor in the English department at Penn State University. He and his wife live in State College, only a few blocks away from three equally bad Indian restaurants.