An Author’s Afternoon on July 7, 2015, presented by Shree Cement, featured author and columnist Lady Kishwar Desai. The conversation between author Kishwar and filmmaker Suman Mukhopadhyay focused on the journey that made her a “social crime novelist”.

Kishwar Desai started her career as a print journalist and worked as a political reporter, moving on to television and broadcast media after a while where she worked for over two decades. Her first novel, Witness the Night won the Costa book award in 2016 for best first novel and has been translated into 25 languages. Her critically acclaimed novel Origin of Love was published in June 2012. Desai’s novel The Sea of Innocence was the third in the series, featuring the Indian middle-aged social worker-cum-crime investigator, Simran Singh. Desai also has a biography on Darlingji: The True love story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt based on interviews with the Dutt family and friends. The novel explored their lives in detail and tells the larger story of the evolution of Hindi cinema.

In her conversation she mentioned that her first novel Witness the Night inspired by a crime incident of Kolkata where a 14 year-old-girl had killed her entire family.