A.R. VENKATACHALAPATHY, Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, has taught at universities in Tirunelveli, Chennai, Singapore and Chicago. Apart from the V.K.R.V. Rao Prize (History, 2007), he has received the Vilakku Pudumaippithan Award (2018) and Iyal Virudhu (2021), both for lifetime contribution to Tamil. He has published widely on the social, cultural and intellectual history of colonial Tamil Nadu. Apart from his scholarly writings in English, he has written/edited over 30 books in Tamil. His publications in English include The Brief History of a Very Big Book: The Making of the Tamil Encyclopaedia, Tamil Characters: Personalities, Politics, Culture; Who Owns That Song?: The Battle for Subramania Bharati’s Copyright; The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes, and Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu; In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History. Presently he is working on biographies of Periyar and V.O. Chidambaram Pillai.
A.S. Dulat, a former chief of the Research and Analysis Wing, was an adviser on Kashmir in the Prime Minister’s Office.
ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH is the author of over 80 books on a wide array of subjects, including the best-selling series The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. He is also the author of the Isabel Dalhousie novels and the world’s longest-running serial novel, 44 Scotland Street. His books have been translated into 46 languages. He is Professor Emeritus of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh and has won a number of awards, including 13 honorary doctorates from universities throughout the world. In 2007, he was made a CBE in the Queen’s New Year Honours List for services to literature. He received the US Duke LEAF Award for Environmental Achievement in 2013. Earlier this year, he was awarded the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction.
AMISH is an author and a former diplomat. He published his first book in 2010 and has written 11 books (both fiction and non-fiction) till date. His books have sold seven million copies and been translated into 20 Indian and international languages. He is the fastest-selling author in Indian publishing history. Forbes India has regularly ranked Amish among the top 100 most influential celebrities in India. He was selected as an Eisenhower Fellow in 2014 and won the 21st Century Icon Award in the UK in 2021 and the Golden Book award for his novel Suheldev in 2022. He is also a host for TV documentaries, including for Discovery TV’s highly acclaimed and award-winning Legends of the Ramayan with Amish. In his diplomatic role, Amish worked as the Minister (Culture & Education) at the Indian High Commission to the UK and the Director of The Nehru Centre in London. Amish is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta. He received the Eminent Alumnus Award from IIM-Calcutta in 2017. He worked for 14 years in the financial services industry before turning to writing. Amish is a voracious reader, a music aficionado and was the lead singer in his college band in IIM-C. He was an active sportsperson, particularly in boxing and gymnastics, in his school and college days.
Chaudhuri Amit is a writer and musician. His first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, is included in Toibin and Callil’s Two Hundred Best Novels of the Last Fifty Years. His last, The Immortals, was a New Yorker, Boston Globe, and San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year. He is the winner of several awards, including the Commonwealth Literature Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Sahitya Akademi Award. He was the first recipient of the Infosys Prize for Outstanding Contribution to the Humanities in Literary Studies. He is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, and is editor of the Picador/ Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. As a musician, he has performed on most flagship cultural programmes on UK radio and television. His latest books include Calcutta: Two Years in the City (non-fiction) and Telling Tales (a collection of essays).
Amitav Ghosh is the author of highly acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction, which include the Booker Prize shortlisted Sea of Poppies (book one of the Ibis Trilogy), River of Smoke, The Glass Palace and The Shadow Lines. He has won numerous prizes, some of which are the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Pushcart Prize and the Grinzane Cavour Prize. He divides his time between New York and India.
AMITAVA KUMAR is the author of several works of non-fiction and a novel. His writing has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, The Hindu, The Guardian, Bookforum, The Nation, The New York Times, Guernica, Caravan, and other publications. He is the Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College in upstate New York. His website is www.amitavakumar.com and is on Twitter @amitavakumar.
AMRITA NARAYANAN is a native of Chennai and lives in Goa where she writes and has a private practice in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. She is the author of a book of short fiction, A Pleasant Kind of Heavy and Other Erotic Stories, and her short story ‘Stolen’, appears in the anthology A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces: Extraordinary Short Stories from the 19th Century to the Present. She is currently editing a volume titled The Parrots of Desire: 1800 Years of Erotic Fiction in India. Her essays on psychoanalysis, culture and women’s sexuality have won awards in India and the U.K. and been published in journals such as Psychodynamic Practice and Psychoanalytic Review.
ANANTHA PADMANABHAN CEO of HarperCollins India, is a photographer, dog lover and a bibliophile. He was born in Madras and now lives in Gurgaon, and considers both places home.
His short fiction has been translated into Chinese, French, German, Hebrew and Romanian. His debut YA novel, The Beast With Nine Billion Feet (2010), was short-listed for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword award. Along with Vandana Singh, he co-edited Breaking the Bow (2012), an anthology of speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana. His most recent work is Half Of What I Say (2015).
ANITA RATNAM is a celebrated performer of dance and theatre. As choreographer, writer, speaker and mentor her impact on the Indian performing arts has been recognised with awards and honours. As a culture catalyst, Anita’s work traverses a wide range — academia, youth outreach, motivational speaking and digital creation.
ANNIE ZAIDI writes fiction, non-fiction, poetry and scripts. She is the editor of Unbound: 2,000 Years of Indian Women’s Writing and the author of Gulab, Love Stories # 1 to 14, and Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales. She is also the co-author of The Good Indian Girl. Her work has appeared in several anthologies including Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean; Mumbai Noir; Women Changing India; and Griffith Review 49: New Asia Now. (blog/site: www.anniezaidi.com)
Antara Dev Sen is founder editor of The Little Magazine, the independent journal of ideas and letters and the first Indian magazine to focus on contemporary South Asian literature and offer it in English. A literary critic, translator, newspaper columnist and social commentator, Sen was earlier Senior Editor of The Hindustan Times and of The Indian Express. She lives in Delhi.
Anuja Chauhan writes bestselling novels (seven so far), which sometimes feature war, cricket, murder, and Lok Sabha elections, and always feature romance and humour. All of them have been optioned by major film studios. She also works in advertising and is best known for her work on Pepsi, Mountain Dew and Kurkure. She writes a fortnightly column for The Week magazine. She lives outside Bengaluru with her husband Niret Alva. They have three grown-up children and a varying number of dogs and cats.
Anuradha Roy is the author of Sleeping on Jupiter, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015 and has been shortlisted for the DSC Prize 2016. She won the Economist Crossword Prize for Fiction for The Folded Earth. Her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, has been widely translated and was picked as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and the Seattle Times. It has been named by World Literature Today as one of the 60 most essential books on modern India and was shortlisted for the Crossword Prize. Anuradha won the Picador-Outlook Non-Fiction Prize in 2004 for her essay, “Cooking Women”. She works as a designer at Permanent Black, an independent press which she runs with her husband, Rukun Advani
Arshia Sattar works with classical Indian literatures and the story traditions of the sub-continent. She is a translator, teacher and book critic. Her translations from Sanskrit of the Kathasaritsagara and the Valmiki Ramayana have been published as Penguin Classics. Along with DW Gibson, Arshia founded and runs the Sangam House International Writers’ Residency Programme outside Bangalore. (www.sangamhouse.org)
Subramaniam, Arundhathi is a poet and writer who has worked as curator, critic and poetry editor. As poet, she is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Where I Live: New and Selected Poems. As editor, her books include Another Country: An Anthology of Post-Independence Indian Poetry in English; an anthology on sacred journeys, Pilgrim’s India; and a co-edited anthology on contemporary love poems, Confronting Love. As prose writer, her books include the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than A Life and The Book of Buddha. She is the recipient of the Raza Award for Poetry, the Homi Bhabha fellowship, the Charles Wallace Fellowship and the Visiting Arts Fellowship. She has been Editor of the India domain of the Poetry international Web for several years, as well as Head of Chauraha (an interactive arts forum) and Indian Dance at the NCPA, Bombay.
AVIROOK SEN is an independent journalist based in Gurgaon. He has been a reporter and editor for 25 years, working in print, online and broadcast media. He has written on a wide range of subjects, from cricket to terrorism and, most recently, crime. His work has appeared in India Today, Hindustan Times, The Express Tribune (Pakistan), New Scientist, NDTV, DNA, Firstpost, Mumbai Mirror and other prominent publications. He is the author of Looking for America (2010) and Aarushi (2015). Sen is an ardent admirer of Capote and Hitchens, and even more so of Hunter Thompson. Sen was born and raised in Kolkata.
Baradwaj Rangan is a film critic. He won the National Award (Swarna Kamal) for Best Film Critic of 2005. His writings on cinema, music, art, books, travel and humour have been published in various national magazines like Open, Tehelka, Biblio, Outlook and Caravan. He has co-written the screenplay for the Tamil rom-com Kadhal 2 Kalyanam. He teaches a course on cinema at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. He has contributed to various anthologies, the most recent being an essay in Subramaniyapuram: The Tamil Film in English Translation. His first book, Conversations with Mani Ratnam, was published in 2012 and his second, Dispatches from the Wall Corner, in October 2014.
DUTT, BARKHA is Group Editor with NDTV, India’s premiere news and current affairs network. She first emerged as a household name with her frontline war reporting on the Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan in 1999, and has since reported from several conflict zones across the world, including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq . She has won over forty national and international awards, including the Global Leader for Tomorrow award from the World Economic Forum, the Commonwealth Broadcasters’ award for ‘Journalist of the Year’, the Asian Television Award for ‘Best Talk Show’ and the NT Award for ‘Best TV News Anchor’. She is the youngest journalist to receive the Padma Shri. She is also the first Meera and Vikram Gandhi Fellow at Brown University. Barkha hosts the weekly award-winning talk-show, We the People and the daily prime time show, The Buck Stops Here. She is active on Twitter (@bdutt), with over a million followers.
CHARI VIJAYARAGHAVAN has been involved in the field of education programmes and product development for the last 15 years. Having observed pedagogy and learning experiences in over 40 countries, his education projects range from ‘Vocabulary through Asterix’ and ‘Geography through Tintin’ to more recent digital products of ‘Maths and Science through Sport’ and ‘English through Cricket’. His interest in nature and conservation has taken him on expeditions ranging from the North Pole to Antarctica. He volunteers with and adopts one animal species a year to get to understand them better, if not support conservation efforts by trustworthy organisations. A Computer Science engineer & an MBA, he maintains a strong connect with college students by being involved in career development and rehabilitation programmes. Climate change has taken him back to the classroom — understanding changing Inuit lifestyles in Greenland and more recently a programme on the ‘Ecology of the polar bears‘ in Canada. His teacher’s hat is always on, and weaving work with travel, he tries to add value to educational programmes through his photos, videos and lesson plans.
CHINMAYI SRIPADA is an award-winning playback singer, trained primarily in Indian classical music. She won the prestigious CCRT scholarship for young talent when she was eight and the AIR gold and silver medals for Ghazal and Hindustani Classical music respectively in 2000 and 2002. She won the Tamil Nadu State Film Award for Kannathil Muthamittaal and the Nandi award for best dubbing artist for Ye Maaya Chesave (Telugu). She is an accomplished dubbing artiste and has served as an RJ and a VJ. Chinmayi founded and runs Blue Elephant, a language services company. In 2011 she was selected for the US State Department Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership and was later invited to attend the Fortune Most Powerful Women’s summit as a mentee of the programme in October 2011.
CHITHRA MADHAVAN a historian by profession, has a Ph.D. in Ancient History and Archaeology from the University of Mysore. A recipient of two Post-Doctoral Fellowships, she is the author of seven books and many research papers on temple art, architecture and epigraphy. She teaches at several institutions in Chennai and delivers lectures on heritage-related topics at various venues in India
Chitravina N Ravikiran debuted as a child prodigy at the age of two and began his career as a Carnatic vocalist when he was five. He switched to the 21-stringed fretless chitravina when he turned 11 and has, since then, performed in various prestigious organisations across the globe. Acclaimed for his award-winning concept Melharmony, Ravikiran is the composer of over 700 pieces which include operatic dance productions such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata. A passionate educationist, he conducted the first-of-its-kind camp for over 31,000 rural children in Tamil Nadu in 2006 as part of the Indian Government’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan programme. The recipient of many coveted awards, Ravikiran is the youngest musician to win the President of India’s Sangeet Natak Akademi Puraskar.
COLM TOIBIN, an Irish writer, is the author of eight novels, including Brooklyn and Nora Webster, and two volumes of stories. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize thrice. His books have been published in more than 30 languages. He is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books and Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of Humanities at Columbia University in New York.
D I ARAVINDAN is a journalist, writer, critic and translator. He is now Features Editor in The Hindu Tamil. He has published 10 books including novels, short-story collections, and critical essays. He has also written the Mahabharata for kids. Aravindan attended a workshop in Wales, the U.K. to bring Welsh literature to Tamil through English. He has also written a book on the writer Sundara Ramaswamy’s life and literary works for Sahithya Akademi. As a journalist, Aravindan’s primary interests revolve around social issues, women’s issues, literature and cricket.
Deepa Dhanraj founded Yugantar, a film collective that arose from her involvement in the women’s movement in 1980. Between 1981 and 1983, Yugantar produced films on labour and gender relations in South India. Spanning over 30 years of practice, Dhanraj has worked in close participation with women’s groups and individuals to address concerns around women’s status, customary and formal law, participatory democracy, activism and citizenship in contemporary India. Some of her award-winning films - Kya Hua Is Shahar Ko?, Something like a War, Sudesha, The Legacy of Malthus, The Advocate and Invoking Justice - have been invited to festivals such as Berlinale, IDFA Amsterdam, FIlms de Femmes, Creteil, Leipzig, Oberhausen and the One World International HUman Rights Festival, Prague. She also has an interest in pedagogy and has created video materials to address the challenges faced by first-generation learners.
DEVDUTT PATTANAIK writes on mythology, which he defines as cultural truths revealed through stories, symbols and rituals. He lectures on the relevance of both Indian and Western myths in modern life. In the last 25 years, he has authored and illustrated over 50 books, including Book of Ram and Dharmic Leadership. Known for his TED talk and TV shows such as Devlok and Business Sutra, he is a regular columnist for reputed newspapers like Times of India and Dainik Bhaskar. A medical doctor by training, Devdutt spent 15years working in the pharma and healthcare industry but, over the past decade, he has been fully immersed in exploring mythology and sharing its wisdom with the world.
DIYA SETHI lives and works in New Delhi as a freelance consultant chef. She also writes on gastronomy for online food forums. She has recently published her first non-fiction work — a memoir titled, The Addict: A Life Recovered — on her struggle with anorexia-bulimia.
KIRE, EASTERINE is a poet, novelist, and writer of children’s books. She also writes short stories and some of her short stories are translated to German. Her first novel, A Naga Village Remembered (Ura Academy 2003) was also the first Naga novel in English to be published. She has a Ph.D in English literature from the University of Pune. In 2011 she was awarded the governor’s medal for excellence in Naga literature. Her poetry and books have been translated to German, Croatian, Uzbek, Norwegian and Nepali. She is currently based in Northern Norway where she concentrates on her writing, and performs jazz poetry with her band, Jazzpoesi.
FERDINAND MOUNT is the author of the bestselling The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805-1905. He was editor of The Times Literary Supplement from 1991 to 2002, and Head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit 1982-4. He is author of 12 novels and was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Of Love and Asthma (1992). He is married with three children and three grandchildren and lives in North London.
GEETA RAMASESHAN is a senior lawyer based in Chennai with more than 30 years of legal practice in the area of constitutional law, criminal law and family law. She has worked extensively in cases relating to discrimination, custodial violence, prisoners, juvenile children, sexual harassment, the rights of minorities, and the rights of persons living with HIV-AIDS. She has written in newspapers and journals on legal issues and is associated with many national campaigns on legislations relating to women and children. She is on the faculty at the Asian College for Journalism, Chennai where she teaches a course on“Media law and society.” She has been a Heinz fellow in the University of Pittsburgh on Comparative law and an Eisenhower fellow on “Human Rights, Public Interest Litigation and Justice”.
GOPALKRISHNA GANDHI is Distinguished Professor of History at Ashoka University, Sonepat, Haryana. His working career has been in public administration, diplomacy, and the exercise of constitutional responsibility. His published works include Refuge, a novel; Dara Shukoh, a play in English verse; The Oxford India Gandhi (ed.); The Tirukkural, a rendering in contemporary English verse of G.U. Pope’s translation of the Tamil classic; Abolishing the Death Penalty; Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: Restless as Mercury (ed.); I am an Ordinary Man: Gandhi (1914-1948) (ed.). He has also translated Vikram Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy into Hindustani.
GOWRI RAMNARAYAN (DR) was a journalist with The Hindu for 23 years, and vocal accompanist to the legendary Carnatic musician MS Subbulakshmi for 17 years. She has translated two plays by Vijay Tendulkar, as also short stories by Kalki Krishnamurti, authored books, and served on the Fipresci Jury at international film festivals. As playwright, theatre director, and founder of JustUs Repertory, Dr Ramnarayan is a rare amalgam of aesthetics and scholarship. Her witty, thought-provoking, often moving plays make original use of music, dance and the visual arts. Her Dark Horse won two national awards (META) and a dramatised reading of her Night’s End by Swedish actors was showcased at an international playwrights conference in Stockholm. Recipient of the Nataka Choodamani and Mohan Khokar Awards for excellence, she has presented a series of lectures and theatre workshops at several north American Universities, and toured the US with her dance, music and theatre productions.
GULAMMOHAMMED SHEIKH studied painting at Baroda and London. He taught art history and painting for nearly three decades at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S University of Baroda. He has had several exhibitions of paintings in India and abroad including a solo exhibition of paintings at the Centre George Pompidou, Paris, 1985. He is now involved in the movement of modern Gujarati literature. He has published two collections of poems — Athawa (1974) and Athawa Ane (2014) — and essays on art in Indian and international journals and lectured on Indian art in Asia, Europe and the US. His awards include the Padma Bhushan (2014), Kalidas Samman (2002), Ravi Varma Puraskaram (2009).
Janice Pariat is the author of Seahorse: A Novel and Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories. She was awarded the Yuva Puraskar (Young Writer Award) from the Sahitya Akademi and the Crossword Book Award for fiction in 2013.
JAYANTHI NATARAJAN is Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests, and a Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha, where she is a representative of Tamil Nadu. She started her career as a lawyer in Chennai. In keeping with her interests in social issues and women’s rights, she has done pro bono work for a number of social organisations such as the All India Women’s Conference. Her entry into politics came in the early 1980s as a member of the Indian National Congress, for which she has, in the past, also been a party spokesperson.
Justice K Chandru is a retired judge of the Madras High Court. He appeared in a number of cases relating to human rights and freedom of the press and has consistently championed the cause of the underprivileged, be it a worker, woman, child, Dalit or political prisoner. During his tenure at the Madras High Court, he strongly defended freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution. He now writes regular columns about law, courts and legal systems. He is a visiting faculty at the National Judicial Academy, Bhopal. He has published two books in Tamil containing his articles on law and judiciary as well as a review of his judgments on social justice.
JUSTICE KRISHNASWAMI CHANDRU was enrolled as an advocate during 1976 and designated Senior Advocate during 1997. He appeared in a number of cases relating to human rights and freedom of the press. He has consistently championed the cause of the underprivileged, be it a worker, woman, child, Dalit or political prisoners. He was appointed as a judge of the Madras High Court on July 31, 2006 and retired on March 8, 2013. During his tenure, he had disposed off 96,000 cases. He declared Tamil Nadu Dramatic Performance Act,1954 requiring prior permission from Police for staging plays as unconstitutional. After retirement, he writes regular columns in newspapers and magazines. He has authored several books in Tamil and English, the latest being the Legal Profession and Appointment of Judges.
SATCHIDANANDAN K. is perhaps the most translated of contemporary Indian poets , having 23 collections of translation in 19 languages. He writes poetry in Malayalam and prose in Malayalam and English. His book While I Write: New and Selected Poems (Harper Collins) came out in 2011. He has lectured and read his poetry across the world. He was a professor of English, and later the chief executive of the Indian National Academy of Literature (Sahitya Akademi) and the Director of the School of Translation Studies, IGNOU, Delhi. He has won 27 literary awards including the Sahitya Akademi, Kerala Sahitya Akademi award (five times), Kusumagraj National Award, NTR National award, Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad Award, Knighthood of the Order of Merit from the Government of Italy and India-Poland Friendship Medal from the Government of Poland.
K. Srilata is a writer, translator and academic. Her latest book This Kind of Child: The ‘Disability’ Story (Westland), brings together first-person accounts, interviews and short fiction on the disability experience. Her books include five collections of poetry, the anthologies The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry, Short Fiction from South India (OUP), All the Worlds Between: A Collaborative Poetry Project Between India and Ireland (Yoda), and Lifescapes: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers from Tamil Nadu (Women Unlimited). Srilata’s novel Table for Four (Penguin) was long- listed in 2009 for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Formerly a Professor of Literature at IIT-Madras, Srilata is now Professor and Director, Centre for Creative Writing and Translation, Sai University, Chennai.
K A GUNASEKARAN (DR) is the first Tamil Dalit playwright (Pali Aadugal). His book Vadu has been credited as the first Dalit autobiography in Tamil and has been translated into English as Scar. He has contributed more than 100 research papers for Dalit conferences across India and sung Dalit movement songs at innumerable Dalit stages over the past 30 years. He has compiled songs that still play a vital role on Dalit stages into three albums: Manushankada, Manushi and Dalit Muzhakkam. The Governments of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry have honoured him with the Kalaimamani award. The Tamil Association of Canada has honoured him with the Dalit Isai Kurisil award.
KANISHK THAROOR is the author of Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories, a collection of short fiction. His journalism and criticism have appeared in international and Indian publications. His short fiction was nominated for a National Magazine Award in the U.S. He writes the “Cosmopolis” column for The Hindu Business Line’s BLInk magazine. He is currently at work on a radio series to be aired on BBC Radio in the spring of 2016, and on a novel. He studied at Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with BAs in History and Literature; at Columbia, where he was a FLAS fellow in Persian and South Asian studies; and at New York University, where he had a fellowship in the Creative Writing Programme. He lives in New York City.
KANNAN SUNDARAM (S R Sundaram) was the proprietor of Kalachuvadu Pathippagam from 1995 to 2010 and is presently the Managing Director and Publisher of Kalachuvadu Publication Pvt Ltd, besides being Editor and Publisher of Kalachuvadu, a monthly journal for culture and politics. He co-organised ‘Tamil In 2000’, a privately funded international Tamil conference on 20th century Tamil writing and was part of the international visitor programme to the U.S in 2002 and of the Frankfurt Book Fair fellowship programme in 2007. Kannan is on a mission to get the best pieces of literature available in Tamil translated to other Indian and world languages and vice versa. He has published a few books containing his columns and critical articles on Tamil media and Politics.
Lavanya Mohan, a Chartered Accountant in Chennai, writes on TV shows
LAWRENCE SURENDRA is a chemical engineer and environmental economist. He has worked with UN-ESCAP, the United Nations University, UNESCO and the Stockholm Environment Institute, Sweden. He has been recognised for his work in teaching, curriculum development, research and contributions to public policy issues and as a scholar-activist-practitioner in India on issues relating to environment and democratic governance, eco-regeneration, renewable energy, plant bio-diversity and sustainable agriculture. He has written extensively on issues relating to the economy, education, science, technology and development and been a regular contributor to Frontline.
LIONEL SHRIVER a widely published journalist, is the author of 11 novels, including The New York Times bestsellers So Much for That (a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award and the Welcome Trust Book Prize) and The Post-Birthday World (Entertainment Weekly’s 2007 Book of the Year). Winner of the 2005 Orange Prize, the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin was adapted for a feature film, starring Tilda Swinton in 2011. Her most recent novel is Big Brother (2013), which addresses obesity. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2014. Her work has been translated into 30 languages. Shriver’s 12th novel, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, a near-future saga about the collapse of the dollar in the United States, will be released in the spring of 2016.
Living Smile Vidya known as Smiley, is the founder-director of Panmai Theatre. Smiley is the first transgender person in India to receive British Council’s Charles Wallace Award 2013 for her excellence in theatre. She has been involved with theatre since 2004. She is the author of I am Vidya, India’s first transgender autobiography. Originally written in Tamil, it has been translated into English, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi and Assamese. Her essays and poems are published in magazines and online magazines. Smiley is also a self-taught artist. Her drawings based on transgender issues in feministic perspective. She has held five exhibitions in Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi. Smiley has also worked in Tamil cinema as assistant director to Mysskin in Nandhalala and also acted in a few short films like Kandal Pookkal and 500 & 5 and in documentary films like Aghrinaigal and Butterfly.
MADHU NATARAJ KIRAN is a performer, choreographer, educator and arts entrepreneur. She has received several awards, the most recent being Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar from the Sangeet Natak Akademi and the Mohan Khokar award for excellence in dance. She studied Kathak from her mother Dr. Maya Rao and from Chitra Venugopal. Though she trained in contemporary dance in New York, Madhu returned to India to create the Natya STEM Dance Kampni. A graduate in commerce, journalism and choreography, she has also trained in Indian martial arts, ritualistic/folk dance traditions, pedagogy and Yoga. She believes dance is a potent medium for change in the public domain. She has performed, designed programmes and choreographic works for prestigious cultural organisations across India, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, UAE, southeast Asia, Europe and the U.S.
MANIL SURI is the author of the trilogy — The Death of Vishnu (2001), The Age of Shiva (2008) and The City of Devi (2013) — which examines the present, past and imagined future of India through the lens of Hindu mythology. His fiction has won the Discover prize (the U.S.), the Corine Buchpreis (Germany), the McKitterick Prize (Britain), and been longlisted for the Booker. He has been translated into 27 languages. He has chronicled gay life in India in The City of Devi and in a memoir for Granta magazine. His play, The Mathematics of Being Human, delves into the intersection of mathematics and literature. His novel in progress, The Godfather of Numbers, will explain mathematics to non-mathematicians. His opinion columns on India, gay rights and mathematics appear regularly in The New York Times.
MARGARET MASCARENHAS is a transnational novelist and poet of Indo-American and Native American origin whose work pushes boundaries of race, gender and genre. She is the author of the diasporic novel Skin, set in colonial India, and The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos, set in Venezuela, where she grew up. She has published one volume of poetry and sketches, Triage: Casualties of Love and Sex. She is currently working on a third novel set in Lebanon, and a second collection of poetry. She lives in Goa, India.
MARÍA REIMÓNDEZ is a Galician translator, interpreter, writer and activist. She has published poetry collections such as Moda Galega (2002) or Presente Continuo (2013); novels for both adults and children such as O club da calceta (translated into Italian and Spanish, with a theatre adaptation by Teatro do Morcego and a film version produced by Ficción Producciones), En vías de extinción (translated into Spanish), A música dos seres vivos, and essays. She has received several prestigious awards in Galicia including the Xerais novel award for Dende o conflito, the Plácido Castro award for translation and the Award for Author of the Year by the Galician Publishers Association in 2014. She has a long connection to Tamil Nadu and has translated authors such as Salma, Kutti Revathi, Malathi Maitri, Sukirtharani and Thamizhachi into Galician.
Mukund Padmanabhan was the editor of The Hindu between 2016 and 2019
N. RAM, former Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu and other Group publications, is a political journalist with literary interests. A former Chairman and a former Publisher of The Hindu Publishing Group, he is currently a Director in the Group. Ram has written on a range of socio-political subjects, including media freedom and responsibility, and specialised in investigative journalism. His areas of special journalistic interest include Indian politics; aspects of India’s foreign policy and nuclear policy; external pressures on India’s economic and political sovereignty; issues of corruption and abuse of power; the challenge of communalism and fundamentalism in India; the Sri Lankan ethnic crisis, the Tamil question, and India’s interaction with it; India-China relations; freedom of expression issues; and the role of media in society. He is a co-biographer, with Susan Ram, of the writer, R.K. Narayan. He was elected president of the Contemporary India Section of the 72nd session of the Indian History Congress (2011). Honours and awards include the Padma Bhushan (for journalism), 1990; the Sri Lanka Ratna (2005); the Asian Investigative Journalist of the Year Award from the Press Foundation of Asia (1990); the B.D. Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism (1989); XLRI’s first JRD Tata Award for Business Ethics (2002); the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism’s Alumni Award (2003); and the Raja Ram Mohan Roy Award for contributions to journalism from the Press Council of India (2018).
NANDINI KRISHNAN is the author of Hitched: The Modern Indian Woman and Arranged Marriage and Invisible Men: Inside India’s Transmasculine Networks. She is also the award-winning translator of Perumal Murugan’s Estuary and Four Strokes of Luck and Other Stories. Her translation of Kalki’s magnum opus Ponniyin Selvan is being released in 10 parts. She has translated Charu Nivedita’s Conversations with Aurangzeb: A Novel. Nandini’s novel-in-manuscript won the Writers of the World Festival prize, 2014. Her translation of Sajjad Haider Yaldram’s Save Me from My Friends was shortlisted for the Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu-English Translation 2022. Nandini lives with dozens of animals, thousands of books, and a varying number of humans in Madras.
NAVROZ MODY has worked on a number of social and environmental issues concerning hill area forest and watershed management, urban planning, industrial location and toxics. He has been associated with the community of workers and residents of Kodaikanal in their efforts to hold a major corporation liable for extensive mercury contamination of workers, local residents and a unique high altitude forest and sanctuary feeding a major waterbody in the plains. He is also involved in efforts to evolve systems of carbon free building materials and construction. He is currently Honorary Secretary of Bombay Environment Action Group (BEAG).
NEHA SUMITRAN is Senior Editor, National Geographic Traveller India. She lives in Mumbai, but spends as much time as she can in the great outdoors, hiking in the Western Ghats, foraging for wild foods in the Himalayan foothills, or trekking in the high mountains. She believes that sustainable travel can help save the planet’s fragile ecosystems and its habitants, both human and others.
Nilanjana S. Roy is the author of The Wildings (awarded the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, 2013), and The Hundred Names of Darkness. Her essays on reading — The Girl Who Ate Books — have just been published. She is the editor of A Matter of Taste: The Penguin Book of Indian Writing On Food (2004). She lives in Delhi and has written on cultural shifts, gender and books for the Business Standard, The New York Times, Granta, Al-Jazeera, the BBC, The Hindu and several other places.
Lakshman, Nirmala is a journalist and Director of The Hindu group of publications. She was Joint Editor of The Hindu and has held senior editorial positions at the newspaper for more than three decades. Nirmala founded and edited The Hindu Literary Review, and conceptualized and created Young World, India’s only children’s newspaper supplement. She launched and curated The Hindu’s literary festival, Lit for Life, and initiated the annual Prize for Best Fiction from The Hindu. Nirmala has a PhD in postmodern fiction from Madras University and a master’s degree in English from the United States. She is the author of Degree Coffee By The Yard and editor of an anthology of contemporary Indian journalism, Writing a Nation.
NITYANAND JAYARAMAN is a Chennai-based writer and social activist. He is part of an anti-corporate collective called the Vettiver Koottamaippu that mobilises young people to get engaged in extending solidarity to social and environmental justice struggles. He is long-time volunteer with the campaign for justice in Bhopal, and is associated with the campaign to hold Unilever accountable for its mercury pollution in Kodaikanal. He has written extensively about disasters and the role of society in exacerbating the impacts of disasters.
OMAR ABDULLAH is the former Chief Minister of Jammu & Kashmir and the Working President of the Jammu & Kashmir National Conference. He has also held ministerial portfolios at the Centre as a Minister of State in the Union Ministry of Commerce & Industries and later in the in the Ministry of External Affairs. He is a staunch advocate of transparency, accountability and responsibility in governance. During his terms as Chief Minister, he pioneered and helped establish institutions like the State Information Commission, the State Accountability Commission, the State Vigilance Commission and the Sher-e-Kashmir Employment and Welfare Programme for Youth (SKEWPY) to encourage educated youth to be self-employed with support from the State. He was also instrumental in enacting the Public Services Guarantee Act and the Right to Information Act and establishing the Panchayati Raj Institutions. Apart from being an avid reader, he loves outdoor sports like river rafting, tennis, skiing, scuba diving and motor cross driving.
PARO ANAND is best known for her writing for young adults. She works extensively for young people in difficult circumstances, especially with orphans of separatist violence in Kashmir. Using literature as a creative outlet, she provided a platform for the traumatized young to express their grief in ways that they had been unable to before. Out of these experiences came three works: No Guns At My Son’s Funeral, Weed, and Wild Child. Paro Anand headed the National Centre for Children’s Literature, the apex body for children’s literature in India. She is a renowned performance storyteller and has performed her stories all over India and in the UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, Sweden and Singapore. Her book, The Little Bird Who Held the Sky Up With His Feet, was on the 1001 Books to Read before You Grow Up list. She runs a programme Literature in Action where she uses stories to talk about difficult issues with young people and empower them creatively, linguistically and emotionally. She is a mentor and curator for Vani Foundation’s Fellowship programme and children’s list.
PHILIP HENSHER was educated at Oxford and Cambridge, where he wrote a PhD on 18th-century English painting and satire. From 1990 to 1996, he was a House of Commons clerk. His books areOther Lulus(1994),Kitchen Venom(1996), which won the Somerset Maugham award,Pleasured(1998),The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife(1999),The Mulberry Empire(2002),The Fit(2005),The Northern Clemency(2008), which was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize,King of the Badgers(2011) andScenes From Early Life(2012), which won the 2013 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. He also wrote a libretto to Thomas Ades’ opera,Powder Her Face(1995), which has been performed across the world, recorded by EMI and filmed by Channel Four. He is a regular contributor toThe Spectator,The Independent, and other English newspapers. Hensher was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1998, and is on the Council of the Society. Philip’s novel,The Emperor Waltz, was published in 2014. He was editor ofThe Penguin Book of the British Short Story, published this year. His new collection of stories,Tales of Persuasion, will be published in April 2016. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and lives in London.
Pradeep Sebastian is the author of The Groaning Shelf, a collection of bibliophilic essays on the book arts. A literary columnist for The Hindu and a film columnist for the Deccan Herald, he is also the co-editor of 50 Writers, 50 Books: The Best of Indian Fiction. His forthcoming novel is a biblio-mystery titled The Book Hunters of Katpadi.
PRAPANCHAN is the pseudonym of the writer Sarangapani Vaithilingam. His first collection of short stories, in Tamil, was released in 1961. Since then he has been a prolific writer with 250 short stories, 14 Kurunavalgal, 10 novels and 300 essays to his credit. They have been brought out in the form of 64 books. Most of these have been translated into other Indian languages, English and French. He has been the recipient of various prizes/awards from the governments of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry including the Ilakiya Sinthanai Prize, the Kovai Kasturi Rangammal Prize, the West Bengal Basha Prize. He was awarded the 1995 Sahitya Akademi Prize for his novel, Vanam Vasappadum. He divides his time between Chennai and Puducherry.
PREMA REVATHI is a writer, actor and activist who runs a school for nomadic tribal children at a village in coastal Tamil Nadu. She was a full-time journalist and continues to write articles in English and Tamil. She is also a translator and is working on non-fiction translations from English to Tamil. Along with Krishna Veni, she began Maitri, a feminist publishing house that aims to bring out memoirs of women, books introducing feminist philosophies and literary anthologies on feminist themes. Lakshmi Ennum Payani, a memoir by a woman activist from a small town in Tamil Nadu, is Maitri’s first Book.
R V RAMANI is a leading documentary filmmaker and cinematographer. He is a graduate of the Film and TV Institute of India, Pune, specialising in cinematography. With more than 25 independent films to his credit, he has established a unique style of his own, making self-reflective impressionistic documentaries, which has found recognition in India and abroad.
RAGHU RAI in his half a century as a photographer, has won many national and international awards and accolades including being nominated in 1971 by Henri Cartier Bresson to Magnum Photos. His solo exhibition has travelled to London, Paris, New York, Hamburg, Prague, Tokyo, Zurich and Sydney. His photo-essays have appeared in Time, Life, GEO, The New York Times, The Sunday Times, Newsweek, The Independent, and The New Yorker. His newest book Picturing Time: The Greatest Photographs of Raghu Rai was published in January 2016. He received the Padma Shri in 1971. Raghu Rai currently lives and works in New Delhi.
RAJINI SARMA BALACHANDRAN is the founder of Jari the Sari Studio. Jari’s purpose is to uplift the Kanjivaram sari tradition to a fine art through design intervention and research. Rajini is a Ph.D. in International Relations from New York University and received awards for her thesis. She trained in New York Studio School and Parsons School of Design. She received the Artist-in-Education Residency Grant from the N.J Council of the Arts. Her recent presentations were on Tamil heritage and the Kanjivaram sari at INTACH (Chennai) and at the University of Foreigners at Palazzo Gallenga in Perugia in Italy.
RAJIV C LOCHAN is the Managing Director and CEO of Kasturi & Sons Ltd (most famously known as The Hindu Group of Publications in India). He heads all non-editorial operations and is the first non-family member on the Board in the company’s 137-year history. Rajiv also devotes time to the social sector in the areas of public health and financial inclusion. He is a Trustee Board member of IKP Trust, a not-for-profit organisation focussed on leveraging knowledge and technology to drive innovation in public health and on the Board of IFMR Trust Financial Holdings, an entity focussed on delivering financial products and services to the bottom of the pyramid in rural geographies in India. Rajiv is an alumnus partner of McKinsey’s India practice and one of the firm’s founding partners of its Chennai practice. At McKinsey, Rajiv served over 30 institutions, including 25 banks and financial institutions in India, South-east Asia and the US. Prior to McKinsey, Rajiv worked for American Express Company in New York, where he was most recently Director - Risk Management, responsible for credit/fraud authorisations policy formulation. Rajiv has also worked with US Airways in Arlington, VA, in the schedule-planning group and was a summer intern at the World Bank in Washington, DC. He holds an undergraduate degree from IIT, Madras, and an MS from MIT, Cambridge, MA, and an MBA from the Columbia Business School in New York.
RAVIKUMAR is a well-known Dalit intellectual, poet, short-story writer, and translator. He was a key figure in the formation of the little magazine, Nirapirikai, which inspired several new writers in the 1990s. He is the author of more than 30 books in Tamil. He was the editor of Dalit, a bi-monthly that served as the platform for Dalit Literature and has published Bodhi, a quarterly exclusively for Dalit history. Now he is the editor of Manarkeni, a research-based bi-monthly in Tamil. A collection of his writings appeared in English as Venomous Touch (2009). Along with R. Azhagarasan, Ravikumar co-edited The Oxford India Anthology of Tamil Dalit Writing (2012). Ravikumar has also served as a Member of the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly (2006-2011) and is the General secretary of Viduthalai Ciruthaikal Katchi (VCK).
RUBIN D’CRUZ is an editor and publisher who has worked for many public sector/voluntary publishing firms since 1987, mainly the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad, Kerala State Institute of Children’s Literature and the National Book Trust, India. He is presently the editor of the Malayalam department of National Book Trust, India (NBT). Rubin has been an Indian delegate at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Italy, Jerusalem International Book Fair in Israel and Sharjah International Book Fair, Sharjah. He was also a speaker at a conference of writers and literary translators (WALTIC) at Stockholm, Sweden. He has been a member of the editorial board of Eureka, a science magazine for children and, later, a member of the publication committee of the KSSP. As Director of Kerala State Institute of Children’s Literature he edited Thaliru, a children’s magazine for the 10-plus age group. Rubin is an advisor to the Publishing Next conference.
RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE is founder, vice-chancellor and professor of history at Ashoka University. He studied at Presidency College, Calcutta, JNU and St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He was awarded a DPhil in Modern History by Oxford University. He taught at Calcutta University. He was also Editor, Editorial Pages, The Telegraph. He held visiting appointments at Princeton University, Manchester University and University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of five books on the revolt of 1857. He edited The Penguin Gandhi Reader and Great Speeches of Modern India. His latest book is Nehru & Bose: Parallel Live
S JANAKARAJAN is an economist and a Professorial Consultant at the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS, Adyar). He obtained his Ph.D from MIDS, University of Madras and did his Post-Doctoral work at the Cornell University, the U.S. He was a Visiting Fellow at the International Development Centre, Oxford University, the U.K. for a year. He is also a Professorial Associate at the Center for Water and Development, SOAS, U.K. He is now the President of South Asia Consortium for Inter-disciplinary Water Studies (SaciWATERs), Hyderabad. He has just completed his work on Urban and peri-urban a water complexity in which he has mapped the entire drainage system and water bodies in the peri-urban districts of Chennai city. His current project is on climate change and delta vulnerability. He has published several books and many papers in national and international journals.
S RAMAKRISHNAN is an influentially important writer of modern Tamil literature. He has been active over the last 25 years in diverse areas of Tamil literature. He has to his credit seven novels, 14 collections of short stories, 34 collections of articles, 10 books for children, three books of translation, nine plays and a collection of interviews. His short stories and articles have been translated and published in English, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada and French. Among his many awards are the Tagore Literary Award for his novel Yamam, the Iyal Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Maxim Gorky Award, the Kannadasan Literary Award, the Wisdom Young Achiever Award, the Nalli-Thisai Ettum Award, the Salem Tamil Sangam award, and Periyar Award.
S.A. Kandasamy is a well-known Tamil critic, author, scholar and documentary filmmaker. His first novel Saayaa Vanam (1968) was listed by the National Book Trust of India as a masterpiece in modern Indian literature. He has to his credit 14 novels, 16 short story collections and 12 collections of essays. He founded a ‘Literary Society’ in Chennai in 1966 and was associated with the literary magazine Ka Sa Da Tha Pa Ra. He has been an advisory board member of the Film Censor Board, the National Book Trust and the Sahitya Akademi. His novel Visaranai Commission won him the Sahitya Akademi award in 1998. He has made documentary films on authors and artists like Jayakanthan, Ashokamitran, S. Dhanapal and Adimoolam. In 2009, he was awarded the Kalaimamani Award by the Government of Tamil Nadu.
S.G. VASUDEV is a founder-member of the Cholamandal Artists’ Village, Chennai, where he lived and worked till 1988. He now lives in Bangalore. Vasudev works in various mediums (drawings, paintings, reliefs in copper and tapestries in silk). He has participated in several important group exhibitions in India and abroad including the Triennale India, the Paris Biennale, the Havana Biennale, India’s National Gallery of Modern Art show in Washington, the Festival of India in Tokyo and The New South: Contemporary Paintings & Sculpture from South India in London. He has held solo exhibitions in different parts of India and the world. Vasudev has also been on the Executive Board of the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, and worked as a selection committee member twice for National Exhibition of Art. He is currently a member of the advisory committee of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore. Vasudev has designed and/or contributed paintings for the cover of several books by leading Kannada writers. He has also been art director for two award-winning Kannada films Samskara and Vamsha Vriksha.
MENON, SADANAND is a nationally reputed arts editor, popular teacher of cultural journalism, photographer, stage lights designer and prolific speaker at seminars on politics, ecology and the arts. He is currently Adjunct Faculty, Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, and at IIT, Madras. He is member, Apex Advisory Committee, National Museum, Delhi; Advisory Committee, National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru; Advisory Council, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi; Governing Council, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; and Managing Trustee, SPACES, An Arts Foundation, Chennai. A close associate of legendary choreographer Chandralekha, he is deeply involved with issues concerning contemporary Indian dance. He also curated a major Retrospective Exhibition of Fifty Years of Dashrath Patel’s work in painting, ceramics, photography and design for NGMA, Delhi and Mumbai.
SALEEM BEG is Member, National Monument Authority, Ministry of Culture, Government of India. He retired as Director-General, Tourism and Culture, J&K, in 2006. He is also the Convener INTACH J&K chapter. He is the founder-trustee of the Indian Heritage Cities Network Foundation and Member, J&K Heritage Conservation and Preservation Authority. His publications include Shehar-i- Kashmir: Cultural resource mapping of Srinagar, a two volume publication on urbanisation, architecture, building technologies; Temple Traditions of Kashmir: Nara nag; Crafts of Kashmir; and Conservation guidelines on Mughal gardens of Kashmir.
SAM PAUL started his journey with Sam Paul Educational Trust, which has promoted a number of educational institutions like Christ College of Engineering and Technology, Dr. S.J.S Paul Memorial College of Engineering and Technology, Stansford International and Billabong International in and around Puducherry. Through his company Paulsons, he has introduced various international brands like Casa Picola, a franchise of a European bistro concept outlet; Toni & Guy, a hairderssing brand; and Haagen Dazs, a premium icecream brand, in the city of Chennai over the last few years and launched home-grown brands like Jonahs, Slam Fitness, Chakra Urban Spa and Provoke, a lifestyle magazine. Paulsons also operates a chain of hotels called Anbu Park Group of Hotels in Villupuram and Tiruchi and also runs the Ponnusamy Restaurants in Chennai. He has recently begun a film production and distribution house, ‘Paulsons Media Private Limited’ to produce top-notch movies that are of value to the society. His first film Night Show will have Sathyaraj in the lead.
SANDHYA RAO has worked in the media for many years, as a print journalist, books editor and children’s books writer, and also helped dancer Chandralekha coordinate an exhibition called ‘Stree’ as part of the Festival of India in Moscow, 1988. She has written about 25 books — mostly picture books — in English and other Indian languages such as Hindi, Tamil and Bengali. Some well-known titles are Ekki Dokki, Storm in the Garden, Grandma’s Eyes, My Friend the Sea, My Mother’s Sari, Picture Gandhi and My Gandhi Scrapbook. Her latest books are Stories on the Sand and Okaasama Otousama. In 2006, she was one of only two children’s authors from India to be invited to the Frankfurt Bookfair. Her book, My Friend the Sea, received a prize at the Berlin Literary Festival in 2005. She is now a Deputy Editor with the Hindu BusinessLine in Chennai.
SANDIP ROY is a journalist and writer living currently in Kolkata. He is a commentator for National Public Radio in the U.S. and has been a senior editor for Firstpost.com in India. His radio broadcasts air every week on KALW public radio in San Francisco. His work has appeared in various publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Telegraph, Salon.com, India Abroad, Huffington Post. Don’t Let Him Know is his first novel.
SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAN was born into a family steeped in Carnatic music. His early training included violin and vocal classes from Guru V. Lakshminarayana, his grand-aunt Guru Rukmini Rajagopalan, Guru Calcutta K.S. Krishnamurthy and, more recently, from Nadaswaram maestro Guru S.R.D. Vaidyanathan. Sanjay is one of those rare and complete performers whose concerts are the product of a lively and intelligent mind. His music has the high authority and purity of tradition and the creativity of an exceptionally gifted artist. His repertoire is vast and varied and an unending work in progress.
Sashi Kumar is the founder and Chairman of the Media Development and Asian College of Journalism. He is a print and broadcast journalist. He was among the earliest newscasters in English on national television, Doordarshan, Middle East Correspondent of The Hindu and news anchor on Radio Bahrain in the mid-1980s. He has produced many docu-features for television. In 1992 he founded and launched Asianet, India’s first satellite and cable TV in a regional language. He received the Vijayaraghavan Memorial Award in 2007 and the Swadeshabhimani-Kesari Puraskaram from the government of Kerala in 2011 for his contribution to media. In 2004 he scripted and directed Kaya Taran, an award-winning Hindi feature film based on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the 2002 Gujarat riots. He has acted in a few Malayalam feature films. Sashi writes a regular fortnightly column titled ‘Unmediated’ in Frontline; it is also the title of the book comprising his essays and articles published by Tulika Books in 2013.
SHAILAJA MENON works as faculty in the area of Language and Literacy at the School of Education, Azim Premji University. She currently leads a longitudinal project, Literacy Research in Indian Languages (LiRIL), investigating the teaching and learning of early language and literacy in Maharashtra and Karnataka. She is also a key anchor of the bilingual children’s literature festival, KathaVana that is hosted annually by Azim Premji University. She has an abiding interest in imparting a love for language, literature and literacy to children, teachers and teacher educators.
SHARAN APPARAO is one of the most well-known curators and promoters of art in India. Since her first presentation of art in 1983, she has made Chennai an established destination for the discerning collector, through Apparao Galleries and its sister concern Art Route (an export firm). In 2007, she was honoured by FICCI as one of the top women achievers in the country for her contribution towards promoting contemporary Indian art. In 2012 she was awarded the Ritz-Audi award for her contribution to art. With a background education in fine arts, Sharan has previously worked at the Smithsonian and Christie’s contemporary art. She now conducts shows in cities across India. It is her curatorial eye that has discovered and been associated with emerging talents in the field of art in India.
SHASHI THAROOR (Dr.), a third-term Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram, is the bestselling author of 25 books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and a former Minister of State for Human Resource Development and for External Affairs in the Government of India. He has won numerous awards, including the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019, Dr. Tharoor was also awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in the category of ‘English Non-Fiction’ for his book An Era of Darkness. He chairs Parliament’s Standing Committee on Chemicals and Fertilizers and has previously chaired the Standing Committee on External Affairs and the Committee on Information Technology.
SHIV KUNAL VERMA is the author of Ocean to Sky: India from the Air, a pictorial on the Military World Games and two books on the Assam Rifles. Another pictorial, The Northeast Palette, was a prelude to the highly acclaimed Northeast Trilogy. He is also the author of The Long Road to Siachen: The Question Why and Courage & Conviction, the autobiography of General VK Singh. His latest book is 1962: The War That Wasn’t. Along with Dipti Bhalla, he has produced some of the most highly acclaimed films on the Services. In 1992, he shot and produced Salt of the Earth for the IAF followed by a series of Naval and Army films, culminating with a film on the Kargil War. In addition he has also made The Standard Bearers (NDA) and the Making of a Warrior (IMA). After a brief stint with India Today and the Associated Press, he went on to direct and photograph the Project Tiger television series.
Siddharth Chowdhury is the author of Diksha at St. Martin’s (2002), Patna Roughcut (2005), Day Scholar (2010), which was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2009 and longlisted for the Jaipur Literary Prize 2012, and The Patna Manual of Style (2015). In 2005, Chowdhury translated Eliot Weinberger’s prose-poem ‘The Stars’ (with etchings by Vija Celmins) into Hindi for the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York. In 2007 he received the Charles Wallace Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the University of Stirling in Scotland. In 2012, Chowdhury was included in the first Elle magazine list of 20 Best South Asian Writers under 40. In 2013, Day Scholar was one of the novels featured in 50 writers, 50 Books: The Best of Indian Fiction. In 2015, Chowdhury received the British Council’s Professional Excellence Award. An Editorial Consultant with the House of Manohar in New Delhi, Chowdhury is married and has a daughter.
SUJATA NORONHA lives and works in Goa with books and children. She has a keen interest in the mode of story-ing and how it can impact, affect and effect thinking and action. She experiments with ideas and books through her organization Bookworm that works with schools and communities through a library programme and then shares her understanding with a wider community as a teacher/library educator.
SUSHILA RAVINDRANATH joined Business India in Mumbai as a staff writer when business was still a bad word and and Business Week famously called the country an elephant on an oil spill. She moved to Chennai in the mid 1980s and has done stories on many South Indian groups, which were publicity-shy and had never been written about. She set up Business India bureaus in all the Southern cities. She helped launch Hansazone website, an entertainment portal for R K Swamy BBDO, before she moved to the New Sunday Express as its editor. She is now a consulting editor for Financial Express and is completing a book on post-liberalisation Tamil Nadu.
Susie Tharu is a founder member of Anveshi - a research centre for women’s studies in Hyderabad. She has been a Professor and Coordinator at the School of Critical Humanities and The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her research interests vary from the cultural history of India, feminism, issues of minority, and social medicine. She has authored six books including a dossier of new Dalit writing from Kerala and Tamil Nadu, titled No Alphabet in Sight, and the well known two volume anthology Women Writing in India, co-edited with K. Lalita.
T SUMATHY (DR) also known as Thamizhachi Thangapandian was a Senior-Grade Lecturer in English at Queen Mary’s College, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, from 1996-2008. As a research scholar, she was the recipient of the Prestigious AIC (Australia-India Council) Fellow Award (2004). Acclaimed as a Tamil poet, her areas of interest include post-colonial literature (especially Sri Lankan and Australian), diasporic literature (especially Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora), translation, criticism and performing arts (Tamil Theatre). Currently, she is a freelance writer and a performer. She has to her credit 12 publications in Tamil and one in English.
T.N. NINAN has been an award-winning editor, TV commentator and board chairman of Business Standard Pvt Ltd. He currently writes a closely followed weekly column, ‘Weekend Ruminations’, in Business Standard. His book, The Turn of the Tortoise, assessed India’s performance and prospects. Ninan has edited Business Standard, The Economic Times and Business World, leading transformational change and achieving rapid growth in all of them. He was also the executive editor at India Today in the 1980s. He serves as Chairman of the Independent and Public Spirited Media Foundation and is a past president of the Editors Guild of India. He is a recipient of awards, including two for lifetime achievement.
TANVEER AHMED MIR is a New Delhi-based criminal lawyer and founder-partner of the law firm Lex Alliance at Defence Colony, New Delhi (India). He has been practising law since 1996. Originally hailing from Srinagar, Jammu & Kashmir, he went to Burn Hall School, Srinagar, and then in shifted to Delhi University in the 1990s. Mir studied for his law & LLM at Campus Law Centre Delhi University and, since 1996, he has earned a strong reputation as a high calibre criminal lawyer having appeared in a large number of cases in New Delhi and elsewhere. Mir has represented the accused in the famous 2G Spectrum Scam; the principal accused in the Citibank Scam; CWG Scam and the well-known Nargis Juneja Kidzee Murder Case at Gurgaon NCR Delhi, besides being the lead defence counsel in the Aarushi-Hemraj double murders and continues to defend Dr Rajesh Talwar & Dr Nupur Talwar in their Appeals before the Allahabad High Court.
THOL THIRUMAVALAVAN is a Dalit activist and the current president of the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi. His political platform centres on ending the caste-based oppression of the Dalits. He has degrees in Chemistry, Criminology and law. He worked in the government’s Forensic Department as a scientific assistant and resigned in 1999 to contest the elections. His books in Tamil include Aththumeeru, Tamizhargal Hindukkala?, Eelam Enral Puligal, Puligal Enral Eelam, Hindutuvathai Veraruppom, and Saadhiya Sandharpavaadha Aniyai Veezhtuvom. Two of his books — Talisman: Extreme Emotions of Dalit Liberation (political essays published in India Today’s Tamil edition) and Uproot Hindutva: The Fiery Voice of the Liberation Panthers (a collection of his speeches) — have been published in English by Stree-Samya Books, Kolkata.
UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1983. His published works include short stories and the novels English, August: An Indian Story (1988), The Last Burden (1993), The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award for writing in English, Weight Loss (2006) and Way to Go (2011), which was shortlisted for The Hindu Prize. In 2008, he was awarded the Order of Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government for his contribution to literature. His most recent book is Fairy Tales at Fifty (2014).
V VISWANADHAN studied at the Madras School of Arts under K.C.S Paniker and participated in the foundation of Cholamandal Artist’s Village in 1966. He travelled to Europe in 1968 and held his first exhibition in the Galerie de France, Paris, in 1970. He has had over 50 exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the world, among them the Centre Pompidou in 1985, Retrospective in NGMA, New Delhi and Marlborough Gallery in 2008. Within the context of contemporary Indian art, often concerned by mediatic realism (figurative realism), Viswanadhan stands out as a unique artist. In the West, the Abstract Expressionists sought their inspiration in Eastern philosophy. Viswanadhan, inversely, looks for the mysterious and miraculous affinity between Western abstraction and a continual search for matter and meaning, which progressively synthesised into geometric harmonies of colour and light.
Vaishna Roy is a Sr Deputy Editor with The Hindu, and writes on books, society and culture. She authors a fortnightly column called ‘Woman, Uninterrupted’ in Melange, besides editing the newspaper’s cinema and property supplements
VENKATESH CHAKRAVARTHY is the Regional Director and HOD-Direction at the LV Prasad Film & TV Academy, Chennai. He started his career as a production executive in the Hindi film industry and as an assistant director & co-script writer in Tamil and Malayalam cinema. He designed the first Bachelor’s degree in Visual Communication, which was launched by Chennai’s Loyola College in 1989. He also designed the curriculum for the Ramanaidu Film School in Hyderabad, where also served as Dean and Professor & Head of the Department of Direction & Screenwriting. His critically acclaimed play, Mirror, has been performed in theatre festivals and workshops in India and Abroad. He also directed the critically acclaimed documentary feature, Chennai: The Split City in 2006.
Vidya Gajapathi Raju Singh, Princess of Vijayanagaram, is a Rotarian, and was the President of the International Women’s Association, and also the President of Soroptomist International. She runs Sumyog, a wedding planning company based in Chennai, and Senhati Eventz, an event management company that handles product launches, book launches, and fashion shows. She is a patron of the Karunnaii School for destitute mentally disabled children, and has organised several fund-raising events. Vidya captained the Madras University Tennis team and has won several medals in Masters Swimming Championships at the State and National Levels. She is an avid trekker and bicyclist. She has been a fitness columnist for the Economic Times, The Madras Plus, Eve’s Touch, Chennai Frappe, Apollo Life, B_ Positive and At a Glance. She has also contributed guest columns to newspapers like The New Indian Express. Vidya has been Brand Ambassador for ACE, Apollo Hospitals Centre for Excellence. She was featured in Vogue’s June 2013 issue, in the list of India’s 50 Best Dressed.
VIDYA MANI is a children’s writer and editor, who wears many hats. She runs a content and design studio called Melting Pot that creates children’’s books and magazines for publishers and NGOs. She is one of the founder-members of Bookalore, a Bangalore-based children’s book club. She runs a travelling bookshop called Funky Rainbow that puts out a curated collection of Indian children’s books at various events. She is also the managing editor of the children’s book review site, Goodbooks.
VIJAY NAGASWAMI (DR) is a Chennai-based psychiatrist, who currently practises Individual & Couple Psychotherapy. He has delivered guest lectures on various aspects and nuances of Marriage, Psychotherapy and Couple Therapy in India. He is the author of six self-help books. The three books in his New Indian Marriage Series — The 24x7 Marriage, The Fifty-50 Marriage, and 3’s A Crowd: Understanding and Surviving Marital Infidelity — have all been bestsellers. His sixth book, To D or Not to D: Working Towards an Amicable Divorce, was launched earlier this year. He’s a columnist and divides his time between his clinical practice, writing, and delivering lectures and talks on various aspects of mental health.
VINUTHA MALLYA is an editor and publishing consultant based in Bangalore. She is the principal consultant at LineSpace Consulting, a consulting editor to Mapin Publishing, a contributing journalist to Publishing Perspectives, and an advisor to the Publishing Next industry conference. She has recently co-founded a literary agency to represent authors writing in Indian languages. Vinutha has an MA in Journalism from Goldsmiths College, London, and an MS in Communication from Manipal University. In the past, she has reported and written for newspapers and news sites, developed e-content and was a faculty for the National Book Trust’s publishing course. She has edited illustrated books, environmental research publications, motivational learning books, fiction and poetry.
VIVAN SUNDARAM studied painting in Baroda and London in the 1960s. Since 1990 he has turned to making artworks as sculpture, installation, photography and video. He has exhibited in the Biennales of Sydney (2008), Seville (2006), Taipei (2006), Sharjah (2005), Shanghai (2004), Havana (1997), Johannesburg (1997) and Kwangju (1997). He has participated in many group shows, such as in London (Tate Modern, 2001), New York (International Centre for Photography, 2008), Tokyo (Mori Museum, 2008) and Munich (Haus der Kunst, 2006). In 2012 he made sculptural garments, performed as a ramp show, called Gagawaka: Making Strange. His History Project — on the making of the modern in Bengal is based on his 1998 site-specific installation at the Victoria Memorial, Kolkata — was released as a book in March 2015.
YOUSUF SAEED is a Delhi-based independent filmmaker and writer, currently managing the Tasveer Ghar archive of popular art. Having worked at organisations like the Times of India and Encyclopaedia Britannica, Yousuf has produced TV programmes (like Turning Point on Doordarshan) and documentary films like Basant, Khayal Darpan, Jannat ki Rail, and Khusrau Darya Prem ka, besides writing in the Times of India, Marg, and other periodicals. He has researched and documented south Asia’s popular Islamic art and heritage, authoring a richly illustrated volume Muslim Devotional Art in India. Yousuf lectures and conducts screening tours all over the world.
ZARA (aka Zabi) runs an event management company called Zaraz Eventzainment. She lives in Valasaravakkam, Chennai, with her husband, Javed, and two daughters. She is interested in writing and has two books in Tamil — Kaattaan, a collection of poetry, and Sabarali Iyyabu, a novel — to her credit.