Authors

Rijula Das received her Ph.D. in Creative Writing in 2017 from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where she taught writing for two years. She is a recipient of the 2019 Michael King Writers Centre Residency in Auckland and the 2016 Dastaan Award for her short story, Notes from a Passing. Her other short story, The Grave of The Heart Eater, was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2019. A Death in Shonagachhi, her debut novel, was also longlisted for The JCB Prize for Literature, 2021. Rijula hails from West Bengal and lives in Wellington, New Zealand.

RITA CHOWDHURY is an award-winning Assamese poet and writer. A former associate professor of Political Science at Cotton University, Guwahati, Rita is currently the director of the National Book Trust. An important voice in contemporary Assamese literature, Rita has written fifteen novels that portray a vivid picture of her strife-torn state. The critically acclaimed Chinatown Days (Makam) is one of her best-known works.

Rituparna Chatterjee is a bestselling author, journalist and columnist. She is a former foreign correspondent and columnist for The Economic Times. For the same newspaper, her column California Dreaming was about her life as an immigrant mother in America, its gun violence and shooter drills for kindergarteners. Her first book An Ordinary Life (Penguin/Viking, 2017) was on the life of the acclaimed actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui. Her second book The Water Phoenix (Bloomsbury, 2020), a magical realism memoir of how she healed from childhood abuse, was in the top five bestselling nonfiction of 2020 and number one on Google India. She is now writing a novel.

Ruchira Gupta is an Emmy winning journalist and founder of the anti sex trafficking NGO Apne Aap, that empowers women and girls to exit systems of prostitution. I Kick and I Fly is her debut fiction novel. She has been awarded the French Ordre National du Mérite, the Clinton Global Citizen Award, and the UN NGO CSW Woman of Distinction, among other honours, for her contribution to the establishment of the UN Trafficking Fund for Survivors, the passage of the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act and her grassroots activism with Apne Aap. She also holds a Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Smith College. She has co-written a book with Gloria Steinem, “As if Women Matter” and edited two anthologies, “River of Flesh” and “Renu’s letters to Birju Babu”. Ruchira has worked for the United Nations in Nepal, Thailand, Kosovo, Iran, and the USA. She occasionally teaches at the New York University’s Centre for Global Affairs as a visiting faculty. Ruchira divides her time between New York and Forbesganj, her childhood home in the foothills of the Himalayas, where she furthers the work of Apne Aap and paints her mother’s garden.

Sadaf Hussain is currently a consultant chef based out of Delhi. An animator by training who worked in the development sector, his food journey took proper shape when he moved to New Delhi and chose to adopt travel as a lifestyle. An avid storyteller, he is passionate about exploring the background and origins of the dishes he encounters. Sadaf is a TEDx speaker, has food shows online and runs the popular food blog www.foodandstreets.com. He believes that everything and everyone has a story to tell, and lives to uncover those stories.

Sagarika Ghose is Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha (All India Trinamool Congress), author and journalist. She has been a journalist since 1991 and has worked at major media houses. Ghose has received several awards in journalism and is the author of two novels, as well as two best-selling biographies: ‘Indira: India’s Most Powerful Prime Minister’ and ‘Vajpayee, India’s Most Loved Prime Minister.’ She has also authored the critically acclaimed work ‘Why I Am A Liberal.’

Samantha Kochharr is the Managing Director of a leading cosmetic company in India. She is also the Chief Expert for hairdressing for IndiaSkills, and the Deputy Chief Expert-Hairdressing for World Skills International. She has been mentoring young talent for many years now. She started her journey in the hair and beauty industry at the age of 11 and has worked in the movie and fashion industry internationally and nationally for many years. She is also an avid painter and potter. Born into a business family, she is the daughter of the legendary aromatherapist—Dr Blossom Kochhar.
She has been a practising shaman since 2013 and has extensively studied energy healing. Over the years, she has worked with people from all walks of life as a grief whisperer. Arribada: The Arrival is her first book and it is an extension of her spiritual journey.
Samantha lives in Delhi and loves to cook and bake for her family and friends. Following her passion, she runs a popular delicatessen in Delhi, The Tea Room, where the menu is based on her old family recipes.

Sandeep Bhushan has worked as a television journalist with India’s pioneering satellite broadcast news channels including TVI, NDTV and Headlines Today TV for twenty years. He has written on media for the Economic and Political Weekly, Caravan, Hindu, Wire, Scroll.in, Outlook and Open. Sandeep has taught media studies at the Centre for Culture Media and Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia and is currently teaching journalism at a private university. He loves mountains and this is his first book.

Sangeeta Bahadur is an Indian Foreign Service officer currently posted in London, UK as a senior diplomat and Director of the Nehru Centre. In the course of her twenty-five year career, she has been posted to Spain, Bulgaria, Mexico and Belgium, besides having served in various capacities in the Ministry of External Affairs, New Delhi, India. She was born in Calcutta in a family of civil servants and was educated in various schools all over India. She completed her off post-graduation from Bombay University, Mumbai, India. Jaal is the first book of her Kaal Trilogy; she is currently working on the second book. Married to an architect, she has two young daughters – she credits all three with inspiring, in their own individual ways, this book and bringing it to fruition.

Sanjay Chopra is a pilot with an international airline, having flown for the past 15 years. This has given him the opportunity to travel the world and explore his interest in the history of various cultures. He spent enormous amounts of time, as a child, with his grandfather who was an amazing story teller and an avid reader and both of which he inherited. What particularly caught his fancy were the gaps in history; the unknown little details, which then become fodder for his fiction. He decided to polish his writing skills by training at the London School of Journalism. A couple of his short stories have been published and short listed for anthologies. Turaché? won the Invisible Ink and the Sunpenny publishing contest from the UK , A Fate Worse Than… was on the winners list of the Creative Writers competition and Men of the Horse was on the highly recommended list of The Millennium Writers and Fish publishing awards. Authors that he reads and rereads are Stephen King, Wilbur Smith and Len Deighton. He lives in Mumbai, India with his wife, Tisca Chopra, who is an actress and they are working on a number of film scripts together. He is currently working on another collection of short stories and a novel set in the backdrop of terrorism in Kashmir.

Satyarth Nayak is an author and screenwriter based in Mumbai. A former SAARC Award winning Correspondent with CNN-IBN, Delhi, he holds a Masters in English Literature from St. Stephen’s. Satyarth’s best-selling biography, Sridevi – The Eternal Screen Goddess, and charting the journey of the screen legend from child star to becoming India’s First Female Superstar, met with high acclaim. His debut novel, The Emperor’s Riddles, that released in 2014, became a bestselling thriller, earning comparisons with Dan Brown for being a ‘history meets mystery.’ His new book, the magnum-opus Mahagatha, is an epic collection of 100 greatest mythological tales from the Puranas of Hinduism. Containing stories of gods, demons, sages and kings in a unique chronological order and described by Anand Neelakantan as ‘a must-have in your home library’, Mahagatha has become a National Bestseller. Satyarth has also scripted Sony’s epic historical TV show, Porus, touted as India’s most expensive series that aired from 2017 to 2019. His short stories have won the British Council award and appeared in Sudha Murty’s Penguin anthology, Something Happened On The Way To Heaven. Named one of the Top 50 Authors to follow on social media and a regular speaker at national and international literature festivals, Satyarth is currently scripting a high-profile web-series for Mythoverse and writing his next biography of another luminary of Indian Cinema.

Savi Sharma is the author of best-selling novel Everyone Has a Story – An Inspirational Story of Dreams, Friendship, Love & Life. She is also the co-founder of motivational media blog, ‘Life & People’ where she writes about positivity, meditation, law of attraction, spirituality and other such topics. She left her CA studies to become a storyteller. She self-published her inspirational novel “Everyone Has a Story”, which went on to become a bestseller, making Savi India’s first successful female self-published author. Her book is published in many languages. The second book of Savi Sharma is “This is not your story”.