Meha Dixit has a PhD in International Politics from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her thesis is titled “Human Security and Post-Conflict Reintegration of Child Soldiers: Disarmament Demobilisation Reintegration (DDR) Programmes in Mozambique and Sierra Leone.” She has worked with Amnesty International and Save the Children. She has also taught at Kashmir University.
Meghnad Jagdishchandra Desai, Baron Desai is a British economist and Labour politician. He stood unsuccessfully for the position of Lord Speaker in the British House of Lords in 2011, the first ever non-UK born candidate to do so. He has been awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in the Republic of India, in 2008. Currently, he is chairman of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) Advisory Board, an independent membership-driven research network. He has been active in the British Labour Party, becoming chairman between 1986 and 1992, and was made Honorary Lifetime and President of Islington South and Finsbury Constituency Labour Party in London. He was made a life peer as Baron Desai, of St Clement Danes in the City of Westminster, in April 1991. Desai retired from the London School of Economics in 2003. Since then he has published many books.
Manu S Pillai is the author of the award winning The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore, which tells a social and political history of Kerala, from the dawn of colonialism in the sixteenth century till the rise of communism in the twentieth. Written over six years and researched in three continents, The Ivory Throne is his first book, which weaves themes of religious nationalism, matriliny, political economy, and feminism through the life and times of the last female Maharajah of Travancore. He is Chief of Staff to Dr Shashi Tharoor (MP), and has worked at the House of Lords in Britain and with Sunil Khilnani and the BBC on their Incarnations Indian history series. He is also text contributor to Serena Chopra’s Bhutan Echoes (Tasveer, 2016), and is a columnist for Mint Lounge, as well as a contributor on history, politics, and culture to The Hindu, Open Magazine, and other major publications. He lives and works out of New Delhi.
Formerly director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, Makarand R Paranjape was educated at St Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he got his master’s and PhD in English. Author/editor of over 50 books, in addition to hundreds of academic papers and articles, he is also a well-known poet and public intellectual. His latest books include Swami Vivekananda: Hinduism and India’s Road to Modernity (2020), New Perspectives in Indian Science and Civilization (2020), and The Death & Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi (2015). Makarand has been professor of English in JNU since 1999.
Madhavi Menon is professor of English at Ashoka University, and writes on desire and queer theory. She is the author of Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama; Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film; and Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism. She is also the editor of Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare.
Koral has published five books ranging from comedy to classic. Her fourth book, a comedy called Summer Holidays has been optioned for screen adaptation. Her fifth book, Ahalya, is also the first of a five part Sati series . She is a literary entrepreneur, discovering new voices through her story laboratory, www.tellmeyourstory.biz Her work is recognised in the list of Innovator25 Asia Pacific 2019.
Kunal Basu is an Indian author of English fiction who has written five novels – The Opium Clerk (2001), The Miniaturist (2003), Racists (2006), The Yellow Emperor’s Cure (2011) and Kalkatta (2015). He has also written a collection of short stories, The Japanese Wife (2008), the title story of which has been made into a film by the Indian filmmaker Aparna Sen. He is the first writer to deal with the opium trade in Indian fiction. This part of British colonial history is often ignored nowadays in British history textbooks.
A prolific writer, Kusum Ansal’s repertoire comprises novels, poems, short stories and travelogues. Her books have been translated into English, Punjabi, Bengali, Urdu, Greek, Russian and French. Her novel Ek Aur Panchvatiwas adapted into the film, Panchvati, by Basu Bhattacharya, for which she wrote the screenplay and dialogues. She has also contributed to television, the All India Radio and the Indian Progression Writers’ Theatre Association. An avid nature lover and a qualified Ikebana teacher, she enjoys flowers as a subject and has written several articles on it.
She has a Masters degree in Psychology from Aligarh Muslim University and a PhD in Hindi Literature from Punjab University. She organizes a monthly literary meet, ‘Samvad’, for creative writers of all languages and has been actively involved with organizations working in the field of education and social services. She is the Director of Chiranjiv Bharti School and has been the recipient of several awards, including the ‘International Women Entrepreneurial Challenge Award’.
Kishalay Bhattacharjee is a senior journalist who has reported from India’s conflict zones for over two decades. His previous books include Che in Paona Bazaar and Blood on My Hands. He has received several awards including the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism award (2006-7) for his coverage of internally displaced people. His coverage of the abduction and rescue of two Italian tourists was nominated for the best current affairs programme by Association of International Broadcasting (AIB) Awards in 2013. He currently teaches in the School of Journalism and Communications at OP Jindal Global University in Sonipat, Haryana.
Kishwar Desai is an Indian author and columnist. Her latest novel The Sea of Innocence has just been published in India and will shortly be published in UK and Australia. Her first novel, Witness the Night, won the Costa Book Award in 2010 for Best First Novel and has been translated into over 25 languages. It was also shortlisted for the Author’s Club First Novel Award and long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Her critically acclaimed novel, Origins of Love, was published in June 2012. Desai also has a biography, Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, to her credit.