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.
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
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reshma Qureshi is an Indian model, vlogger, and anti-acid activist. In India, she is the face of Make Love Not Scars. Her foray into modeling in the United States came when she walked the catwalk for Archana Kochhar at the 2016 New York Fashion Week. Reshma works tirelessly towards empowering other acid-attack survivors like herself and has become a beacon of hope for millions.