Authors

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.

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.

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.

Lady Mohini Kent Noon is an author, journalist, playwright, film-maker & charity worker. She worked as a print journalist with India Today newsmagazine and other publications. She had a fortnightly radio slot on BBC Radio 5 Live and Radio Scotland.

Namita Devidayal is an author and a journalist, living in Mumbai. She graduated from Princeton University. She has written the award-winning memoir ‘The Music Room’, a novel, ‘Aftertaste’, and ‘The Sixth String of Vilayat Khan’, a journey into the life of the great musician. She is a trained classical singer and is the co-director of a literature festival in Mumbai.

Namita Gokhale is a writer, publisher and festival director. She is the author of fourteen works of fiction and nonfiction. Her acclaimed debut novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion, was published in 1984. The recent Things to Leave Behind has been described as her most ambitious novel yet. Other books include Gods, Graves and Grandmother, A Himalayan Love Story, The Book of Shadows, Shakuntala: The Play of Memory, Priya in Incredible Indyaa, The Habit of Love. The Book of Shiva and The Puffin Mahabharata are born out of her deep interest in Indian religion and mythology. Edited anthologies include In Search of Sita, Travelling In, Travelling Out and Himalaya, co-edited with Ruskin Bond. Gokhale is a founder and co-director of the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival and Mountain Echoes, the Bhutan Literature Festival. She is the director of Yatra Books, a publishing house specialised in translation. She has curated ‘Kitaabnama’, India’s only multi-lingual book show for the national channel Doordarshan. As a literary activist, she is passionately committed to showcasing the spectrum of writing across the Indian languages.

A writer, child-rights activist, and an award-winning actor, Nandana Dev Sen is the author of six children’s books, translated into more than 15 languages globally, and two collections of her translations of the poetry of her mother, Nabaneeta Dev Sen. She grew up in India, England and America, and has starred in 20 feature films from four continents (and in multiple languages). Nandana’s first book Kangaroo Kisses was selected by 320 UK nurseries as a “Book of Excellence,” and her interactive workshops have been loved, in person, by more than 30,000 young people across the world.

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University (where she won the Detur Book Prize, as well as the John Harvard Scholarship and Elizabeth Agassiz Award each year) and studying filmmaking at the USC School of Cinema-Television, Nandana worked as a book editor, a screenwriter, a translator, an advocate for child protection, and as Princess Jasmine in Disneyland. The winner of several Best Actress awards, the Wingword Poetry Prize, as well as the Last-Girl Champion Award for lifetime achievement in child protection, Nandana has served on numerous child-rights commissions and juries of global film festivals and international literary prizes (including the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature). As an advocate and ambassador, she has represented such prominent organizations as UNICEF, Operation Smile, RAHI, Apne Aap International, and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, to fight against child abuse and to end human trafficking

Nandana is the Child Protection Ambassador for Save the Children India, a global Author Advocate for Girls’ Education for Room to Read, and a Director of the Women’s Refugee Commission, New York, where she serves on the Programs and Advocacy Committee.

Nandini Das is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at Oxford University, Fellow of Exeter College, and Honorary Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She studied English at Jadavpur University, India, before going to the UK as a Rhodes Scholar to read English at University College, Oxford, followed by a doctorate at Trinity College, Cambridge. She is a scholar of Renaissance literature, travel, migration, and cross-cultural encounters, and has published widely on these topics, from their appearance in the writings of major sixteenth and seventeenth century authors such as Philip Sidney, Shakespeare and Cervantes, to the fleeting presence of three Japanese boys in sixteenth century Portuguese-held Goa, India. Among her books are Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570-1620 (2011) and The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (2019), co-edited with Tim Youngs. Her most recent book, Courting India: England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire, received the 2023 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. A BBC New Generation Thinker, she regularly presents television and radio programmes on her research. Her work has received funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Leverhulme Trust, the UK India Education & Research Initiative (UKIERI), and the European Research Council. A founding member of UKRI Research England Council (2016-2022) and a current member of the UK Committee on Research Integrity, she is involved in research committees at national and international levels across multiple areas.

Navdeep Suri is Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation. He is an advisor to several prestigious international organizations and an independent director on the board of reputed companies. He is also Professor of Eminence at Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar.Navdeep Suri completed a distinguished 36-year career in the Indian Foreign Service in 2019, having served in India’s diplomatic missions in Cairo, Damascus, Washington, Dar es Salaam and London and as India’s Consul General in Johannesburg. He has headed the West Africa and Public Diplomacy departments at the Ministry of External Affairs and was India’s High Commissioner to Australia and Ambassador to Egypt and UAE. In a rare gesture, the President of UAE conferred on him the Order of Zayed II, the country’s second-highest civilian award. His innovative use of social media in public diplomacy in 2010 also received extensive recognition and two prestigious awards.Navdeep Suri has learnt Arabic and French, has a master’s degree in economics and has written on India’s Africa policy, on the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific, on Public Diplomacy and on the IT outsourcing industry. He has also co-edited the ORF-Global Policy book ‘A 2030 Vision for India’s Economic Diplomacy. His English translations of his grandfather Nanak Singh’s classic Punjabi novels have been published by Penguin as ‘The Watchmaker’ and by Harper Collins as ‘A Life Incomplete’ ‘Khooni Vaisakhi’ and ‘Hymns in Blood.’

Navtej Sarna was India’s Ambassador to the United States, High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, and Ambassador to Israel. He has also served as Secretary to the Government of India and as the Foreign Office Spokesperson. His earlier diplomatic assignments were in Moscow, Warsaw, Thimphu, Tehran, Geneva, and Washington DC. His literary work includes the novels The Exile and We Weren’t Lovers Like That, the short story collection Winter Evenings, non-fiction works The Book of Nanak, Second Thoughts, and Indians at Herod’s Gate, as well as two translations, Zafarnama and Savage Harvest. He is a prolific columnist and commentator on foreign policy and literary matters, contributing regularly to media platforms in India and abroad.

She grew up in a typical Marwari home with six siblings, in New Delhi. She has been inculcated profusely by her mother with a passion for both the spoken and written word and divides her time between writing and pursuing her interest in poetry, philosophy and paranormal. A passionate ‘people-watcher’, she is drawn to oddities and thrives on writing about personalities and human behaviour, from the quirky to the mysterious, to the bizarre, a subject that she does chillingly close to the bone.

Neerja Chowdhury is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and political commentator. In the course of a distinguished career of over forty years, she was political editor of the Indian Express for ten years and covered the terms of eight prime ministers and ten Lok Sabha elections. She has won several prestigious awards for her journalism including the first Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Women Mediapersons (1981), the India Today–PUCL Journalism for Human Rights Award (1983), and the Prem Bhatia Award for Best Political Reporting (2009–10).

She is contributing editor, the Indian Express, and her weekly column, The Neerja Chowdhury Column, is widely followed by participants and observers of contemporary Indian politics. She lives in Gurgaon.