Authors

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.

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”.

Seema Anand is a London-based mythologist and narrative practitioner. She is an acknowledged authority on the Kama Sutra and lectures on Eastern Erotology, Tantric philosophy, the Mahavidyas, Mahabharata and Bhagavad Gita, among other subjects. Her work on the revival and reproduction of oral literature from India is associated with the UNESCO project for Endangered Oral Traditions.

Seema Goswami is a journalist, columnist and author. She began her career with the Anand Bazar Patrika Group, working for Sunday magazine before moving on to become Editor of The Telegraph’s weekend features. She currently writes a weekly column, Spectator, for the Hindustan Times’ Sunday magazine, Brunch, which has a large and dedicated following. Her book, Woman on Top, written to help women in the workplace, was one of the first titles to be published by Random House India and has been translated into several Indian languages.

Seema’s latest book is a political thriller, which offers an insider’s view of Delhi’s political world based on her years of experience as a journalist. Race Course Road was published by Aleph last year and went on to feature on several bestseller lists. Seema is currently working on a sequel to Race Course Road, which promises to be as exciting a read

Sharbari Zohra Ahmed was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her family moved to the United States when she was three weeks old. She is a playwright and screenwriter, and also writes fiction. She barely graduated high school but now teaches creative writing in the MFA program in Manhattanville College, and is Artist in Residence in Sacred Heart University’s graduate Film and Television Program. She lives in Darien, Connecticut.

Shashi Deshpande is an award-winning Indian novelist. She is the second daughter of famous Kannada dramatist and writer Sriranga. She was born in Karnataka and educated in Mumbai and Bangalore. An eminent novelists of contemporary Indian literature in English. She has written four children’s books, a number of short stories, and nine novels, besides several perceptive essays. Deshpande creates figures that take her readers through the social strata of urban society, but her interest comes to centre more and more on women of the middle and upper middle classes; well-educated women who fight for their own space, for their place in the family and in their social and their cultural setting. This setting is the backdrop to her stories, action remains private, even with rape which is, after all, private only to a certain degree.

An author, politician, and former international civil servant, Dr. Shashi Tharoor straddles several worlds of experience. Currently a second-term Lok Sabha Member of Parliament (MP) representing the Thiruvananthapuram constituency and Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, he has previously served as Minister of State for Human Resource Development and Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. During his nearly three-decade long prior career at the United Nations, he served as a peacekeeper, refugee worker, and administrator at the highest levels, serving as Under-Secretary General during Kofi Annan’s leadership of the organisation. Dr. Tharoor is also an award-winning author of sixteen books of both fiction as well as non-fiction.

A well-known actor and politician, Shatrughan Sinha has acted in many iconic films such as Kalicharan, Dostana, Kaala Pathar, Paras, Dost and Blackmail. He was Union Cabinet Minister of Health and Family Welfare (2003-2004) and Shipping (2004). His biography Anything But Khamosh is out in 2016.

Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan is the author of numerous award-winning children’s books including Indi-Alphabet, How Many Lines in a Limerick?, Prince With a Paintbrush:The Story of Raja Ravi Varma, It’s Time to Rhyme and the upcoming book from Harper Collins, Parvati the Elephant’s Very Important Day. Shobha is also a translator, poet, editor, voice-over talent and former non-profit development professional who spent over two decades as an advocate for persons with disabilities. Shobha’s voice has been used in documentaries, educational and journalistic initiatives and audio books, both in India and the United States and her essays and reviews have appeared in multiple publications including India Currents, Scroll.in, Skipping Stones and Bizworld.

Shrayana Bhattacharya is an economist trained at Delhi University and the Harvard Kennedy School. Since 2006, she has worked on research projects with the Institute of Social Studies Trust, SEWA and Centre for Policy Research. Her first book of non-fiction Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh : India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence was published by HarperCollins India in November 2021. Shrayana recently won the Times of India JK Paper AutHer Prize for Best Non-Fiction Author and the SKOCH Economic Forum Prize for Literature. She has also won the FICCI Ladies Organization Prize for Literature in 2022. She was listed in Open Magazine’s Top Minds list for 2022 and has recently became a Kamalnayan Bajaj Aspen Fellow. Her writing on women and the economy have appeared in Mint, Times of India and Hindustan Times.

Simon Robert Napier-Bell is an English music manager, author and journalist. When Japan broke up, Napier-Bell wrote his first book, You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, about his experiences in the music business in the 1960s. He wrote another book, Black Vinyl White Powder, about the British music business which was received with favourable reviews. In March 2005, he published another book, I’m Coming To Take You To Lunch, the story of how he took Wham! to China.

Sonal Mansingh is an Indian classical dancer and Guru Bharatanatyam and Odissi dancing style; who is also proficient in other Indian classical dancing styles. Over the years, dance has taken her all over the world and brought her many awards, including the Padma Bhushan (1992), Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1987, and the Padma Vibhushan, India’s the second highest civilian award, in 2003; making her the second woman dancer in India to receive such an honour.