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Aakash Singh Rathore
Aakash Singh Rathore is an internationally-reputed author of nine books, including the just-released Becoming Babasaheb: The Life and Times of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (Harper Collins, 2023), and the best-selling Ambedkar's Preamble: A Secret History of the Constitution of India (Penguin, 2020). He has also published 17 edited books ranging from literature and philosophy to law and religion, and even on wine (The Complete Indian Wine Guide, Roli Books, 2007). His Hegel’s India (Oxford University Press) was short listed for the Non-fiction Book of the Year at the Tata Literature Live Book Awards 2017. Rathore’s books have been reviewed and featured in Scroll.in, The Wire, Outlook, The Caravan, The Quint, The Print, Livemint, The Week, EPW, The Hindu, The Indian Express, The Tribune, Deccan Herald, and many other popular print and online media outlets.
Rathore writes the monthly column “Poorva Paksha” for the Deccan Herald, and has bylines in The Indian Express, Outlook magazine, The Times of India, Firstpost, Huffington Post, The Quint, The Print, Scroll.in, and other magazines and papers. Rathore is also a top-ranking triathlete, and has finished eight grueling Ironman Triathlons, known as the world’s most difficult one-day sporting event. He has featured, both as an athlete and as an author, on the Asia News Network, News18, The Caravan, Pragati podcast, The Seen and the Unseen podcast, Deccan Herald, The Sunday Times, The Hindu, The National, and NDTV. He has also spoken at the Jaipur LitFest, The Times of India Delhi LitFest, the Vidarbha LitFest, the Bangalore LitFest, and other litfests around the world. He regularly delivers talks, lectures, workshops and courses throughout India and abroad.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a New York Times bestselling author and has a forthcoming poetry book, Night Owl (Ecco, 2026).
She has two illustrated collections of essays: Bite by Bite and World of Wonders, chosen as Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year and as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. In addition, she is the author of four award-winning poetry collections and spent a decade serving as the poetry editor for environmental magazines, first for Orion and then Sierra. Awards for her writing include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, US Artist Fellows, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
A professor of English and creative writing for over twenty-five years, she gives firefly tours for Mississippi State Parks and lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her family.
Alexandra Pringle
Alexandra Pringle is a distinguished British editor whose career spans over four decades shaping literary fiction. She launched her career at Art Monthly, then joined Virago Press as its fourth employee, editing the acclaimed Modern Classics series and rising to Editorial Director, championing feminist voices. In 1990, she became Editorial Director at Hamish Hamilton, honing skills in literary acquisitions, and did a spell at a literary agency. Pringle joined Bloomsbury in 1999 and served as Editor-in-Chief until 2022, overseeing adult trade and editing a stellar roster including Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Gilbert, Khaled Hosseini, Jhumpa Lahiri, Colum McCann, Ann Patchett, George Saunders, Kamila Shamsie, and Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah. Her tenure emphasized bold storytelling across genres, blending editorial precision with author partnerships. Honored with FRSL fellowship and honorary doctorates, Pringle now directs Silk Road Slippers while mentoring via residencies. Her work revived classics and launched bestsellers, influencing global literature profoundly.
Ameen Haque
Ameen Haque is the founder of Storywallahs and believes good stories happen to those who can tell them. He considers himself a story monk i.e. both a student as well as a practitioner and teacher of storytelling. CEO’s, change makers and business leaders from across the world have turned to him for help with their stories. He has studied business administration and followed that up with a course in advertising & media planning from MICA. Formerly a Vice President at Ogilvy & Mather, Ameen has over 20 years of experience in advertising, marketing, consulting and theatre.
His work is deeply influenced by his experiences in communications, both as a marketer and as an actor. He learned storytelling while creating campaigns for some of the biggest brands, helping start-up founders raise funds and while telling stories to those with the lowest attention spans - children. When not studying or teaching storytelling, he loves climbing hills and playing table tennis.
Amitabha Bagchi
Amitabha Bagchi is the author of five novels including the DSC Prize winning Half the Night is Gone. His debut, Above Average (2007), was a bestseller. The Householder (2012) was a novel inspired by Amitabha’s reading of Shrilal Shukla, and received critical acclaim. Amitabha’s third novel This Place (2013) was a love-letter to the city of Baltimore in the US. His most recent work is the novel Unknown City which is a sequel to Above Average. Amitabha has also translated the ghazals on Muneer Niazi into English under the title Lost Paradise (Juggernaut, 2022).
Annie Finch
Annie Finch is an American poet, translator, editor, and teacher. She is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Spells: New and Selected Poems. Finch, described in The Dictionary of Literary Biography as “a central figure in American poetry,” is recognized for her contemporary reclaiming of formal poetic craft and her mesmerizing poetry performances. Her poetry has appeared in the New York Times, Poetry Magazine, and the Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry and has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, French, Malayalam, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. Finch’s other works include influential essays, books, and anthologies on poetics, poetry-writing, feminism, and women’s earth-based spirituality. Educated at Yale and Stanford University, where she earned her Ph.D., Annie Finch has taught widely at universities and literary gatherings and is the founder of Meter Magic Spiral, where she teaches poetry online. She has performed her poetry in India, Mexico, Africa, and throughout Europe.
Annie Zaidi
Annie Zaidi is a bilingual writer and current research scholar (Creative Writing) at Durham University. She won the international Nine Dots Prize (2019) for creative thinking and her prize-winning essay was developed into Bread, Cement, Cactus: A memoir of belonging and dislocation (CUP, 2020). She also received the Tata Literature Live Award for fiction (2020) for Prelude to a Riot (Aleph), which was also shortlisted for the JCB prize that year.
Her other works include the novellas City of Incident and Gulab, and The Comeback (forthcoming), a collection of short stories Love Stories # 1 to 14, and a collection of essays Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales (Aleph, reissued with a new introduction in 2023). She is the editor of Unbound: 2000 Years of Indian Women's Writing, and has co-authored (with Smriti Ravindra) the inter-genre collection The Good Indian Girl. She also won the The Hindu Playwright Award (2018) for her drama script Untitled 1, and her radio script Jam was named regional (South Asia) winner for the BBC’s International Playwriting Competition (2011). She has written and directed the documentary film tracing the literary history of Indian women: In her words: The journey of Indian women, and has also written the story for the multi-award winning short film Two Way Street.
Her body of work that spans multiple genres including non-fiction, fiction, stage and film scripts, poetry and graphic storytelling, and has appeared in several anthologies and literary journals including Wasafiri, Massachusetts Review, Portside Review, The Charles River Journal (Boston), Anti Serious, The Aleph Review, The Missing Slate, Out of Print,and Griffith Review. She trained as a journalist and has published essays and columns in several magazines and websites, including Caravan, Republica (Italy), Griffith Review (Australia), Frontline, The Hindu, Scroll.in, BBC Hindi, Outlook, Mint Lounge, First Post, DNA, Open, Elle, GQ India and Conde Nast Traveller.
Anupama Dalmia
Anupama is a multiple award winning blogger, author, serial entrepreneur with three ventures, sociopreneur, digital content creator, creative writing mentor, choreographer and mother to a 8-year-old. She is a Karamveer Chakra awardee which is a Global Civilian Honour presented by International Confederation of NGOs in association with the United Nations. She has been featured among the top bloggers and influencers of India on multiple leading platforms and her entrepreneurial journey has been covered by coveted media like Official Humans of Hyderabad, The Hindu, The New Indian Express, Business World, Femina, The Better India, Women's Web, TOI Group, Influglue, Youth Ki Awaaz and YourStory to name a few. She was featured by Zee News and Tribune among the 100 Influential Indians of 2022.
Anupama is the Founder & Chief Mentor at Beyond the Box which is a literary platform that focuses on honing the creative writing skills of children with a holistic approach. She strongly believes that learning is fun when you make it fun, and employs unconventional strategies to enable children to express without the fear of being judged and bloom to their full potential. She has reached out to 13,000+ kids across the globe till date through her classes and workshops at various schools, communities and public events, and has also come up with numerous pioneering initiatives and projects for unleashing the creativity in children like BTB Talkies - the first audio book in the world by kids, for kids. For her contribution in this space, she was awarded 'Educationist of the Year' award at IBM Awards 2020 and Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan Award 2020. Beyond the Box was declared the 1st Runner Up at Global Book Community Awards 2020 in the category of "Best community for Children and Young Adults" out of 1000+ participating communities from around the world. You can find further details about her here.
Arunava Sinha
Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern, and contemporary Bengali fiction and nonfiction into English. Seventy-one of his translations have been published so far. Twice the winner of the Crossword translation award, for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), respectively, and the winner of the Muse India translation award (2013) for Buddhadeva Bose’s When The Time Is Right. He has also been shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction prize (2009) for his translation of Chowringhee and for the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative Translated YA Book Prize for his translation of Md Zafar Iqbal’s Rasha, and longlisted for the Best Translated Book award, USA, 2018 for his translation of Bhaskar Chakravarti’s Things That Happen and Other Poems.
In 2021, his translation of Taslima Nasrin’s Shameless was shortlisted for the National Translation Award in the USA. Besides India, his translations have been published in the UK and the US in English, and in several European and Asian countries through further translation. He is an associate professor of practice in the Creative Writing department at Ashoka University, and Co-Director, of the Ashoka Centre of Translation.
Arundhathi Subramaniam
Described as 'one of the finest poets writing in India today', Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning Indian poet. She is the author of twelve books, of which five are books of poetry. Widely translated and anthologised, her book, When God is a Traveller (2014) was the Season Choice of the Poetry Book Society, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her new book of poems, Love Without a Story, published earlier this year with Westland Amazon, is already in its second reprint.
As editor, her most recent book is the acclaimed Penguin anthology of medieval Indian sacred poetry, Eating God. As prose writer, her books include The Book of Buddha; the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life; and most recently, Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga (co-authored with Sadhguru).
She is the recipient of various Indian and international awards and fellowships, including the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Zee Women’s Award for Literature, the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy, the Mystic Kalinga award, the Charles Wallace, Visiting Arts and Homi Bhabha Fellowships, among others.
Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari
Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari is an Indian filmmaker, writer, and artistic producer whose work is celebrated for its emotional depth, nuanced storytelling, and profound understanding of human relationships.
A gold medallist in Applied Arts from Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai, she spent over a decade in advertising, crafting compelling narratives for leading brands across India and Southeast Asia before transitioning to cinema.
Her acclaimed body of work includes Nil Battey Sannata, Amma Kanakku, Bareilly Ki Barfi, Panga, Ghar Ki Murgi, Ankahi (anthology), Faadu, and System. Across films and streaming, her storytelling has earned widespread critical acclaim and numerous national and international honours for its emotional authenticity and layered narratives.
Her debut novel, Mapping Love, further established her as a storyteller whose voice transcends mediums. Recognised by Forbes India in 2020 and 2024 as one of India's self-made women, Ashwiny is the co-founder of Earthsky Pictures, where she develops original stories while championing emerging creative voices. Beyond filmmaking, she founded Roots, an initiative documenting the untold stories of Indian art, craft, and design. Guided by empathy, curiosity, and a deeply mindful perspective, through her films and creative initiatives, Ashwiny continues to champion stories rooted in the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.
Atika Chohan
Widely known for penning Bollywood’s most progressive, inclusive and unflinching socio-political stories, screenwriter Atika Chohan won immense critical acclaim for co-writing Chapaak, a film based on the life of acid attack survivor, Laxmi. Her stellar work also includes "Guilty"(2020), “Margarita with a Straw (2015)” and “Waiting”(2016). Starting her journey as a Print and TV Journalist, Atika wrote for The Hindu and CNN-IBN before she found her true calling in fiction writing and graduated as a screenwriter from Pune’s Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in 2008.
Chetan Mahajan
Chetan Mahajan is the co-founder of the Himalayan Writing Retreat. A Penguin-published author, he quit the corporate world and moved to a village in the Himalayas to be a full-time author, blogger and teacher almost a decade ago. The Himalayan Writing Retreat is all about helping people with their writing. He is also a writing coach with the London based the writing coach.
Chetan blogs about life in a Himalayan village at www.uncity.blog. This blog won the Indiblogger award for Humour in 2017.
He is currently working on his first novel "Tara and Vishnu" and also co-authoring a non-fiction book with his co-founder, Vandita (details below). Chetan often writes columns for the Readers Digest, Mint, Outlook Magazine, Hindu Business Line and the Hindustan Times (Brunch).
For more details, visit: www.chetanmahajan.com.
Dibakar Banerjee
Dibakar Banerjee started his career in advertising, being a feature filmmaker, he still continues to be an ad-filmmaker.He also runs his own film production company.
As a filmmaker, he is known for Khosla Ka Ghosla, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, both of which won National Film Awards. His next film was the experimental Love Sex Aur Dhokha. It was followed by the political drama Shanghai and Bombay Talkies, which was made as a celebration of the centenary year of Indian cinema.
He is also known for the movies, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, Titli, Ghost Stories and Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar Hai.
Divya Prakash Dubey
Divya Prakash Dubey is a Hindi bestseller author, and songwriter and has a couple of short films too credited to his name. His three books, a couple of collections of stories in Hindi – Terms, and Conditions Apply and Masala Chai, and a short novel, Musafir cafe have changed the very fabric of modern Hindi writing.
He is the first Hindi author of this fusion style of writing, thereby making the popular fiction genre of Hindi Indian Literature appealing to a wide audience. His other groundbreaking efforts include the widely-read Sunday Wali Chitthi and StoryBaazi. Both are revolutionary and new ways of storytelling to the masses.
All his published books (Aako -Baako, Ibnebatuti, October junction, Musafir cafe, masala chai) have been bestsellers. More than 1.5 Lacs copies Sold. His books were in the top ranks of the Dainik Jagran & Nielson’s bestseller list. He is the first person to present a TEDx talk in Hindi. His audio shows have been the most loved shows on Amazon Audible.
After being a Corporate Marketing professional and content editor with a leading channel, he is now a full-time writer and develops movies, web series, and audio shows in his writer’s room. Some of the major projects he has been associated with as a dialogue writer includes, Movie PS-1 (Directed by Mani Ratnam) releasing on 30th September and Web Series(Dr. Arora) created by Imtiaz Ali on Sonyliv.
He belongs to a new line of Hindi authors who are rewriting the rules of the game. Read more about him at his website: Divya Prakash Dubey | Hindi Author & Storyteller (Storybaazi)
Erika Krouse
Erika Krouse leads the Himalayan Writers Retreat with a special emphasis on fiction and creative non-fiction.
Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Esquire.com, The Kenyon Review, Story, Ploughshares, One Story, The Iowa Review, and other publications. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize and the Best American Short Stories. Her novel Contenders (Rare Bird Books), was a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and appears in German with Aufbau-Verlag. Her short story collection, Come Up and See Me Sometime (Scribner), won the Paterson Fiction Award, was a New York Times Notable Book of the year, and has been translated into six languages. Erika received her MA from CU Boulder, where she also taught creative writing. She has taught at Lighthouse since 2008, and mentors for the Book Project. She's written everything from book reviews for The New York Times to horoscopes for Glamour. The only thing she doesn't like writing is her bio.
Geeta Ramanujam
Geeta teaches two storytelling workshops at the Himalayan Writing Retreat every year. She is the founder and Executive Director of Kathalaya, India leading storytelling organization. She created the Kathalaya Trust to revive the traditional art of storytelling,
Geeta is an internationally renowned storyteller and teacher. She uses storytelling as an effective educational and cultural tool for parents, teachers, NGOs and corporate sectors both in India and abroad.
Geeta talks about how she was once shy of speaking in public, forget telling stories. But now when you see her tell a story - where she may roar like a lion or do a brilliant enactment of a little squirrel, you wonder how that could be true. Ramanujam, who was formerly a teacher at the Valley School, bring her classroom genius and applies it to the subject of storytelling to deliver an amazing learning experience.
Gurcharan Das
Gurcharan Das is one of India's most celebrated authors and thinkers. He is best known for two iconic, best-selling books: India Unbound offers a personal account of India’s economic rise and is available in numerous languages and filmed by the BBC. The Guardian called it 'a quiet earthquake!' The second, The Difficulty of Being Good, illuminates our day to day moral dilemmas, and ‘one of the best things I’ve read about contribution of great literature to ethical thought,’ according to the philosopher, Martha Nussbaum. The New York Times wrote 'Something tremendous is happening in India, and Das, with his keen eye and often elegant prose, has his finger firmly on the pulse of the transformation.'
Gurcharan Das graduated in philosophy with honours from Harvard University, where he was later inducted in 2013 in Phi Beta Kappa for ‘high attainments in liberal scholarship.’ He also attended Harvard Business School (AMP) where he is featured in four case studies. He was CEO of Procter & Gamble India and Managing Director, Procter & Gamble Worldwide (Strategic Planning) before he retired early to become a full-time writer.
His newspaper columns on current issues and philosophy are among the most widely read in the country. His other books include India Grows at Night: A liberal case for a strong state, which was on the FT’s best books for 2013. Another major work, Kama: The Riddle of Desire, teaches how to cherish desire in order to live a rich, flourishing life. He has also written a novel, A Fine Family; a book of essays, The Elephant Paradigm, and an anthology, Three Plays. His most recent titles are a memoir, Another Sort of Freedom, which describes his lifelong struggle to give meaning and purpose in life, and a longish essay, and The Dilemma of the Indian Liberal. He has edited for Penguin a 15-volume economic and business history of India, and he lives in Delhi with his wife.
Jacqui Lofthouse
Jacqui Lofthouse is Founder of The Writing Coach, a leading London-based mentoring and development organisation for writers. She is the author of four novels and was nominated for The Booker Prize by Penguin for her first novel ‘The Temple of Hymen’. She is also the author of ‘Bluethroat Morning’ (Bloomsbury), ‘Een Stille Verdwijning’ and ‘The Modigliani Girl’. Her novels have sold over 100,000 copies in the UK, the USA and Europe, and have been widely reviewed.
Jacqui began her career as an actor touring India as Sheila in J.B. Priestley’s ‘An Inspector Calls’. She went on to study Drama and English at University of Bristol and subsequently worked in radio production and media training. In 1992 she studied for her MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia under Sir Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain.
Jacqui has taught creative writing in a broad variety of settings from City University, London to Feltham Young Offenders Institution. She has coached and advised many advanced writers including international prize-winning authors, broadsheet newspaper columnists, academics from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and MA Creative Writing graduates. She has also taught English and Drama in London secondary schools.
She is motivated to help other writers to bring their important stories into the world. Jacqui has recently completed her first YA novel.
Jerry Pinto
Jerry Pinto is a well known poet, writer, editor and translator. He has an LLB from Government Law College, Mumbai and a degree in the humanities from Elphinstone College. He has written Em and the Big Hoom, a novel that won him The Crossword Prize, the Hindu Lit for Life Award and the Sahitya Akademi Award. In 2016, he was awarded the Windham-Campbell Award for Fiction from Yale, USA. His next novel Murder in Mahim won the Valley of Words Award for Fiction. His third novel The Education of Yuri has just been published to near universal acclaim.
Mr Pinto is also a translator. He has translated Daya Pawar's path-breaking autobiography Baluta, Sachin Kundalkar's debut novel Cobalt Blue, Mallika Amar Sheikh's I Want To Destroy Myself, Ganesh Matkari's Half-Opened Windows, Baburao Bagul's When I Hid My Caste, Eknath Awad's Strike A Blow to Change the World, Vandana Mishra's I The Salt Doll among others. His translation from Hindi of Swadesh Deepak's I Have Not Seen Mandu has been acclaimed. He is now working on Konkani Dnyaanpeeth award winner Damodar Mauzo's next novel. His work in nonfiction is equally illustrious. He has won the National Award for the Best Writing in Cinema for his analysis of Helen, the Life and Times of a Bollywood H-Bomb. His latest book is a biography of Chemould Art, Citizen Gallery. He has also written books for children. Anya and Her Baby Brother and My Daddy and the Well were on the Parag Honours List. Mr Pinto has two books of poetry, Asylum and I Want a Poem and Other Poems. Mr Pinto sits on the boards of MelJol which works in the sphere of child rights and the People's Free Reading Room and Library. He has taught journalism at the postgraduate Social Communications Media course of the Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai.
Kanishka Gupta
Kanishka Gupta runs Writer’s Side Literary Agency, the leading South Asian agency he founded in India. His authors have most recently won the International Booker Prize in 2025 and 2022, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020. Among his notable authors are Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi (International Booker winners for Heart Lamp, 2025), Daisy Rockwell (International Booker winner for Tomb of Sand, 2022), Avni Doshi (Burnt Sugar, shortlisted for Booker prize 2020), and Jerry Pinto (Windham-Campbell prize, 2016).
He has worked closely with the 2022 Booker winner, Shehan Karunatilaka on multiple projects. He also represents translations by Arunava Sinha (shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and The Stella Prize in Australia, 2024), Meeti Shroff Shah (shortlisted four times for the CWA Dagger Prize), Neha Dixit (CPJ International Press Freedom Award 2019 winner; The Many Lives of Syeda X longlisted for 2025 Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing), Yuvan Aves (Intertidal shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2025), and Nicholas Brookes (An Island’s Eleven won the Wisden Cricket Book of the Year 2023, the 2023 Derek Hodgson Book Award, Sunday Times Cricket Book of the Year 2023, and MCC Book of the Year 2023).
Kathleen Rooney
Kathleen is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University, and her recent books include the national best-seller, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press 2017) and the novel Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (Penguin 2020). Where Are the Snows, her latest poetry collection, was chosen by Kazim Ali for the X.J. Kennedy Prize and published by Texas Review Press in Fall 2022. Her newest novel From Dust to Stardust, based on the life and work of the silent movie star Colleen Moore, is out with Lake Union as of September 2023, and her picture book Leaf Town Forever, co-written with her sister Beth Rooney, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press.
Her reviews and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Poetry Foundation website, The New York Times Book Review, Allure, The Chicago Review of Books, The Chicago Tribune, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay.
Kelly Rigby
Kelly Rigby is a freelance editor, creative consultant and writing coach. The writers she’s worked with have gone on to land publishing deals and literary agents, be long and shortlisted for major literary prizes, win Romance Writers of Australia awards and Varuna fellowships, and achieve success in independent publishing.
Tertiary qualified in creative writing, business, and TESOL, Kelly has thirty years combined experience working as a writer, editor and teacher. The past ten years she has worked exclusively with fiction and memoir writers and is a Senior Tutor for The Writers Studio, where she teaches story structure and novel writing.
As a writer, Kelly has written two short films and numerous short stories, and been published in print, as well as on the web. One of her essays was chosen for a Louise Hay book – Modern Day Miracles, and another was selected for a Covid Anthology, Stories from the Heart, Penning the Pandemic, which was published in cooperation with The Royal Historical Society of Queensland. She was also a columnist for Hearts Talk, the Romance Writers of Australia newsletter. Her most unusual publication was an 8 word story about CHANGE which appeared on a Queensland billboard.
When she’s not writing and editing stories, Kelly is reading, watching or talking about stories. She has been interviewed for podcasts and is known for sharing advice and encouragement on her Write With Kelly Instagram account. In her downtime, she can be found hanging with her kids and an overly needy cavoodle, and feeling guilty when she chooses cake over her yoga practice.
Kritika Pandey
A Pushcart-nominated writer from Jharkhand, India, Kritika Pandey is a graduate of the MFA for Poets and Writers, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Her many accolades include the 2020 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation and shortlisting for the commonwealth prize in 2018 as well as 2016.
In2020, she was the Overall winner of the Commonwealth short story prize
for her story “The Great Indian Tee and Snakes”. "A gut-punch of a story, all the more shocking in its charged conclusion given that most of it is set at a tea seller's and its energy derives from a few looks between a boy and a girl" says the Ghanaian writer NiiAyikwei Parkes, one of the Judges. You can read the story at https://granta.com/the-great-indian-tee-and-snakes/ .
Her writing has been published in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Raleigh Review, The Common, Granta, and UCity Review, among others. Her other awards include the 2014 Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh, the 2018 Cara Parravani Memorial Award in Fiction, the 2018 Harvey Swados Fiction Prize, and the 2020 James W. Foley Memorial Award.
Manav Kaul
Manav Kaul is an award-winning Indian theatre director, playwright, author, actor, and filmmaker.
He was nominated for the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the film Tumhari Sulu (2017). He went onto win a national award for this very role.
Amongst his notable plays are Ilhaam, Park, and Shakkar Ke Paanch Daane, which was his first outing as playwright and director in 2004. His influences include Charles Bukowski, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Franz Kafka, and Nirmal Verma, to whom he paid homage in his 2010 play Red Sparrow.
Manav Kaul is also a writer with more than 7 books to his credit which includes both fiction and poetry. Some of his works include titles like Theek Tumhare Peeche, Tumhare Baare Mein, Bahut Door Kitna Door Hota Hai, Chalta Phirta Pret, and Prem Kabootar which was further translated into English as A Night in the Hills (Westland, 2019).
Mae Mariyam Thomas
Mae Mariyam Thomas is a presenter, podcast producer, journalist, entrepreneur and voice over artist, with over a decade of experience in the radio industry and 5 years in the podcasting space. She started her career as a News Editor/Journalist for a community radio station in Wales, UK. When she moved back to India in 2010, she continued working in radio as a presenter, producer and creative manager at Chennai Live 104.8FM and then moved to Mumbai hosting their afternoon request show, 'Mumbai On Demand' on 94.3 Radio One. Eventually from radio, she began exploring the growing medium of podcasting and now runs her own podcast production company. She’s most well-known for being the host of India’s first indie music podcast Maed in India which was selected by Apple as one of the Best Podcasts of 2018 in India. The show has been running for over 7 years and is a platform to showcase some of the best independent music coming out of India. With over 300 episodes out so far, it features interviews, new/unreleased music and live recording sessions with indie musicians. In 2019, she was chosen by GQ magazine for their 50 Most Influential Young Indians. Also, Maed in India is a 2021 Webby Award Honoree in the category of Limited Series & Specials - Diversity & Inclusion. In 2022 at the India Audio Summit & Awards, Mae won Best Podcast Host - Music Podcast and Podcaster of the Year (Fan Favourite). More recently, at the Cosmopolitan Blogger Awards 2024, she won Podcaster of the Year (Editor’s Choice). Currently, she works as a podcast consultant to develop audio ideas, design shows, handle production and distribution of podcasts. Her ideal is to be creatively bold, nurture ideas and help people find their voice.
Rahul Pandita
Rahul Pandita is the author of multiple bestselling books:
1. Our Moon Has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir
2. Hello, Bastar: The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement
3. The Loverboy of Bahawalpur: How the Pulwama case was cracked
4. The Absent State: Insurgency as an Excuse for Misgovernance [co-authored].
Rahul is one of the founding editors of Open Magazine and has previously worked with the Indian Express and the TV Today group. He was also the Opinion and Special Stories Editor of The Hindu, one of India's leading newspapers, which he quit citing editorial interference.
Rahul is the recipient of the International Red Cross Award for conflict reporting in 2010. He is a 2015 Yale World Fellow. His recent book, Our Friends in Good Houses, released in October 2025 is his debut in fiction. It follows a journalist’s journey and explores themes of displacement and belonging.
Rahul Soni
Rahul Soni is a writer, editor and translator. He is an editor at large with HarperCollins Publishers India, where he has published a number of award-winning authors from Avni Doshi to Vinod Kumar Shukla, from Arshia Sattar to Madhuri Vijay, from Janice Pariat to S. Hareesh. During his time at HarperCollins, he has acquired and edited books that have gone on to become among the country’s best-selling and best-known literary works of recent years, and have won every major award in India, as well as winning or being shortlisted for major international awards including: the Booker Prize for Fiction, the JCB Prize for Literature, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the International Dublin Literary Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the National Translation Award (ALTA), the PEN/Faulkner and PEN/Nabokov awards, The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, etc.
He is the founding editor of South Parade, a print-only journal of literature from the Global South. He has previously been associated with: Writer’s Side, the largest literary agency and consultancy in South Asia; the international writer’s residency, Sangam House; Almost Island, a space for avant-garde writing; and Asymptote, an international journal of translation. He was also co-founder and editor of the pioneering multilingual literary journal Pratilipi and its imprint Pratilipi Books. He was a Charles Wallace Visiting Fellow in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in 2010, received the Sangam House Fellowship in 2012, and was selected for the Omi International Arts Center Writing Residency at Ledig House, New York, in 2014.
As a translator, his publications include a selection of Ashok Vajpeyi’s poetry, A Name for Every Leaf, Pankaj Kapur’s novella, Dopehri, Shrikant Verma’s Sahitya Akademi Award-winning poetry collection, Magadh, and International Booker Prize-winner Geetanjali Shree's novel The Roof Beneath Their Feet.
Ranjit Hoskote
Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, cultural theorist, translator and curator. His collections of poetry include Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006), Central Time (Penguin, 2014), Jonahwhale (Penguin, 2018, published in the UK by Arc as The Atlas of Lost Beliefs, 2020, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation), Hunchprose (Penguin, 2021), and Icelight (Wesleyan University Press in the USA and Penguin in India, 2023).
Hoskote’s translation of a celebrated 14th-century Kashmiri woman mystic’s poetry has appeared as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). More recently, his translation of the poems of the great 18th-century Urdu poet, Mir Taqi Mir, has been published as The Homeland’s an Ocean (Penguin Classics, 2024). Hoskote is the editor of Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2012), the first annotated critical edition of a major Anglophone poet’s work. His book of essays on the poet and painter Gieve Patel has appeared as To Break and To Branch: Gieve Patel (Seagull, 2024).
Hoskote curated India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011) and was co-curator, with Okwui Enwezor and Hyunjin Kim, of the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008). Since 1993, he has curated numerous exhibitions of visual art, both in India and internationally: these include museum retrospectives of major artists such as Jehangir Sabavala (NGMA, Mumbai and Delhi, 2005-06), Atul Dodiya (NGMA Delhi, 2013) and M F Husain (MathafMuseum of Modern Art, Doha, 2019), as well as transhistorical research-oriented exhibitions such as The Sacred Everyday: Embracing the Risk of Difference (Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, 2018).
Hoskote has been honoured with such prestigious awards as the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award, the Sahitya Akademi Translation Award, the Sanskriti Award for Literature, the S H Raza Award for Literature, and the 7th Mahakavi Kanhaiyalal Sethia Award for Poetry. He has been a fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa, and has held writing residencies at Villa Waldberta, Munich; the Polish Institute, Berlin; and Theater der Welt, Essen-Mülheim.
Hoskote has been an associate fellow of Sarai-CSDS, at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, and researcher-in-residence at BAK/ basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, as well as a contributor to BAK’s long-term Former West research project. He has served on the Jury of the Venice Biennale (2015) and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Bergen Assembly, Norway. In 2022, Hoskote was Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University.
Rega Jha
Rega wrote all sorts of things - listicles, Twitter rants, comedy sketch scripts, memes - before settling down with the essay. Over a decade-long media career, she’s published hundreds of pieces of writing across a range of platforms, including The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Vogue, The Times of India, The Indian Express, Firstpost, Condé Nast Traveler, FiftyTwo, Outlook, and BuzzFeed, among others. Much of her body of work - spanning op-eds, longform reportage, memoir, and cultural criticism - examines popular sentiments: how emotions like pride, paranoia, desire, belonging, and anxiety are culturally generated, and how they’re mobilised in political, public life. She currently publishes weekly essays in the newsletter Here/Now Studies, and is working on her first book of essays.
Before launching into independent writing, Rega spent several years as the founding Editor-in-Chief of BuzzFeed India, where she led a team of writers and creators who gathered an audience of tens of millions of young Indians online.
Rega studied non-fiction writing at Columbia University and social science at Oxford.
RJ Sayema Rehman
RJ Sayema is an acclaimed radio presenter, digital content creator, and storyteller with a rich career spanning over two decades. She holds an M.Phil. in Social Work from Delhi University and has cleared the NET and JRF. After a brief tenure as a lecturer at Delhi University, she chose to follow her passion for broadcasting, embarking on a journey that has made her a household name in Indian radio.
Her radio career began in 1997 with All India Radio as an English presenter and National News Reader. In 2003, she joined Radio Mirchi, where she became synonymous with the iconic Hindi retro night show, Purani Jeans. The show held the No.1 position in Delhi for 14 years before concluding in 2017, but continues to entertain audiences across cities in India and the USA.
Currently, she hosts Suno Sayema in Delhi, a show that embodies the essence of authentic radio—deeply engaging, thoughtful, and interactive. Sayema is known for her ability to connect with her listeners on a personal level, making her show a platform where Delhiites share their stories, challenges, and joys.
An award-winning radio jockey, Sayema has successfully bridged the generational gap, bringing diverse audiences together through her signature style of storytelling and engagement. She has also played a pivotal role in reviving the legacy of Urdu literature on private radio with Ek Purani Kahani, a series dedicated to the timeless works of Saadat Hasan Manto. Her recitations of Urdu poetry, featuring legendary poets like Ghalib, Faiz, and Kaifi Azmi, have further cemented her reputation as a preserver of literary heritage.
Beyond radio, Sayema is a prominent digital creator with a strong social media presence. Her series P for Pronunciation, Urdu Poetry, and Urdu Ki Paathshala have garnered widespread appreciation. With over 2 million followers on Facebook, 1 million on X (formerly Twitter), and 620K on Instagram, she continues to influence and inspire a vast audience across platforms.
RJ Sayema’s ability to weave narratives, spark meaningful conversations, and engage with diverse audiences makes her a powerful voice in both traditional and digital media.
Rochelle Potkar
Fictionist | Poet | Critic | Curator | Editor | Translator | Screenwriter
Award-winning writer, Rochelle Potkar’s book of haibun Paper Asylum was shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2020. Author of Four Degrees of Separation and Bombay Hangovers, she is an alumna of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2015) and a Charles Wallace Writer’s fellow, University of Stirling (2017).
She was invited as a creative-writing mentor for the 2019 Summer Institute, The International Writing Program, Iowa. Read more about her at https://rochellepotkar.com
Shabnam Minwalla
Shabnam Minwalla is a mother of three teenagers, an ardent saree-shopper and a Mumbai-holic. She has spent most of her life with words—editing her school magazine, working as a journalist with the Times of India and writing non-fiction. She writes features for various publications, but what she most enjoys is writing books for children.
Her first book, The Six Spellmakers of Dorabji Street is being used as a reader and has been performed as a play by many Mumbai schools. Her books for younger readers -- `The Shy Supergirl', `Lucky Girl’ and `When Jiya Met Urmila’ -- are immensely popular. `The Shy Supergirl’ was shortlisted for the Singapore-based Red Dot Award. While `When Jiya Met Urmila’ won the Neev Book Award.
`What Maya Saw’ – a fantasy, clue-hunt in Mumbai—was nominated for the Crossword Book Award, the Neev Book Award and the Peekabook Award.
Shabnam has also written the laugh-a-minute Nimmi series, short stories in a number of anthologies, a stack of picture books and a popular non-fiction book on the Mumbai neighbourhood of Colaba. Her two new books for young adults -- `Saira Zariwala is Afraid’ (Winner of the AttaGalatta Bangalore Lit Fest Award) and `Murder at Daisy Apartments’ (winner of the Times of India AutHer Award for Children's Book of the Year) have delighted horror and mystery buffs.
Her book `Zen’ – a mixture of history, politics, romance--has been greeted by fantastic reviews. It has won the Times of India AutHer Award for the Children’s Book of the Year and been shortlisted for the AttaGalatta Award and the Neev Book award.
Shabnam has been a speaker at the Jaipur Lit Fest and has conducted workshops and book readings at Bookaroo, the Kala Ghoda Festival, the Tata Lit Live festival and lit fests around the country. She got her MA in Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She was also a Chevening Scholar at Wolfson College in Cambridge.
Shekhar Kapur
Shekhar Kulbhushan Kapur (born 6 December 1945) is an Indian filmmaker and actor. Born into the Anand-Sahni family, Kapur is the recipient of several accolades, including a BAFTA Award, a National Film Award, a National Board of Review Award and three Filmfare Awards, in addition to nomination for a Golden Globe Award.
Kapur became known in Bollywood with his recurring role in the television series Khandaan. He then made his directorial debut with cult classic Masoom in 1983, before gaining widespread acclaim with Mr. India in 1987. He then gained international recognition and acclaim in 1994 with biographical film Bandit Queen, based on the infamous Indian bandit and politician Phoolan Devi, it was premiered in the directors fortnight section of the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and was screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival.
Kapur achieved further international prominence with the 1998 period film Elizabeth, a fictional account of the reign of British Queen Elizabeth I, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards. He then directed war drama film The Four Feathers (2002). In 2007, he directed Elizabeth: The Golden Age, the sequel to his 1998 Elizabeth film.
Sumit Bansal
Sumit Bansal leads the Blogging workshop at the Himalayan Writing Retreat. Sumit He has been blogging since 2013, and went full-time into it in 2015. The first blog that Sumit started was about Excel Spreadsheets.
Trumpexcel has become amongst the best Excel blogs in the world and enabled Sumit to quit his full-time job at IBM and live a life of freedom he always wanted. Sumit's fascinating story was covered by Problogger podcast, IndieHacker, Ideamensch, Side Hustle School Podcast, and many other sites and publications. In 2018, CEO Magazine featured Trumpexcel as one of the “50 Emerging Startups to Watch in 2018”.
Tishani Doshi
Tishani Doshi publishes poetry, fiction and essays. For fifteen years she worked as the lead dancer of the Chandralekha company in Madras, India, performing on stages all across the world, and as such, the body has been a central preoccupation in her work—a vehicle to explore gender, violence, sexuality and power, but also as an agent of renewal and transformation. Since her debut, Countries of the Body, which won the Forward Prize for best first collection (2006), she has sought to find joineries between the lyric and the political. Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (2017) headlined the All About Women Festival at the Sydney Opera House and was shortlisted for a Ted Hughes Award. Her novels, The Pleasure Seekers (2010) and Small Days and Nights (2019), have been shortlisted for the Hindu Fiction Prize, Tata Fiction Award and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. A God at the Door, her most recent collection of poems, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize 2021. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi.
Dr. Vandita Dubey
Dr. Vandita Dubey is the author of "Parenting in the age of sexposure: Raising the precocious generation" , published by Rupa in 2016. Dr. Dubey earned her Doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology from the Illinois School of Professional Psychology in 2006 and obtained her Psychologist License from the State of Indiana in 2007. She trained and worked in private practice, community mental health centers, and schools in the US. Her research focused on resilience. She started her private practice in Gurgaon in 2008 and has consulted with schools and corporates. Dr Dubey also holds a degree in Medical & Psychiatric Social Work from TISS, Mumbai, and worked with NGOs on the issue of child sexual abuse in Delhi and Mumbai between 1997 and 2000.
Dr. Dubey now chooses to live in the Himalayas, where she has co-founded the Himalayan Writing Retreat. She has designed the Emotional well-being through Writing workshop which she conducts. She is also the expert psychologist featured on the popular YouTube channel Zen-brain.
Dr. Dubey has also just finished her second book with the working title “Against the tide – lessons from the journeys of those who left the 9-5 in search of meaning.” She is conversation with multiple publishing houses through her agent and hopes to publish the book in 2023.
Varun Grover
Varun Grover is a lyricist, writer, stand-up comedian and filmmaker.
He's written lyrics for almost 30 films, and won the national award for writing "Moh Moh Ke Dhaage". He co-created "Aisi Taisi Democracy" and is currently touring the country as a stand-up comic. He has written "Paper Chor", "Hari Patang Pe Hara Patanga" and other books. He directed "All India Rank" which closed the Rotterdam Film festival, and most recently his short film "Kiss" released on Mubi. He has written many films including the critically acclaimed "Masaan", eight shows, and was the writer and executive producer for "Sacred Games".
His work ranges from sheer beauty in his lyrics to pure masala entertainment to social and political commentary in his comedy to heavier themes like LGBTQ and censorship in "Kiss".