Ameena Hussein, born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, graduated with two degrees in sociology, specializing in gender and ethnicity and worked for ten years in an NGO focusing on violence against women and human rights. Ameena began writing short stories and published her first book Fifteen in 1999. Short-listed for the Sri Lankan based Gratiaen Prize it was labelled ‘man-hating’ by the judges. Her second book of short stories Zillij won the State Literary Prize. Her first novel, The Moon in the Water, was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. She currently runs her publishing house.
Amruta Patil, writer and painter, is the author of the graphic novels Kari and Adi Parva.
Anita Nair is the bestselling author of The Better Man, Ladies Coupe, Mistress, Lessons in Forgetting and Cut Like Wound. Her books have been translated into thirty languages. She has also published a collection of poems, Malabar Mind; a collection of essays, Goodnight & God Bless; two plays and the screenplay for the movie adaptation of her novel Lessons in Forgetting, which won the National Film Award in 2013. She was awarded the Central Sahitya Akademi award in 2013. Her new novel Idris will be published shortly.
Anjum Hasan is the author of the short fiction collection Difficult Pleasures, the novels Neti, Neti and Lunatic in my Head and the collection of poems, Street on the Hill. She has contributed to several anthologies including 50 Writers, 50 Books: The Best of Indian Fiction; HarperCollins Book of English Poetry; The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers. She is currently books editor at the Caravan magazine and lives in Bengaluru.
Anuradha Marwah is the author of three novels of which the most recent is Dirty Picture, besides plays, poems and articles. She is associate professor at University of Delhi and researches the market for Indian fiction in English. She is also a development activist and is currently working with out-of-school adolescents in rural Rajasthan.
Bapsi Sidhwa grew up in Lahore, and now lives in Houston, Texas. Her novels An American Brat, Cracking India, The Pakistani Bride, The Crow Eaters and Water have been published in several European and Asian languages. Sidhwa received the Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe/Harvard, the Zoroastrian Literature Award, the Pakistani honour Sitara-i-Imtiaz, and most recently the Italian Premio Mondello in 2007. Cracking India originally published as Ice-Candy-Man was made into the film Earth by Canadian director Deepa Mehta.
Bina Shah is a Pakistani writer from Karachi. The author of four novels and two collections of short stories, her novel Slum Child was a bestseller in Italy; her work has been published in several languages. She is a contributing opinion writer to the International New York Times and writes a monthly column for Dawn. Her fiction and non-fiction works have appeared in Granta, the Independent, the Istanbul Review, Asian Cha, and the award-winning collection And the World Changed. She holds degrees from Wellesley College and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her novel A Season for Martyrs is due in 2014.
Jaishree Misra has published seven novels. She has an MA in English literature from Kerala University and two post-graduate diplomas from the University of London – one in special education and the other in broadcast journalism. She recently returned to India from the UK, where she worked at the BBC, in the social services department and as a film examiner at the British Board of Film Classification in London. She currently lives in Trivandrum, Kerala.
Janice Pariat is based between the UK and India. Her first book Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories won the Sahitya Akademi’s Young Writer Award 2013 besides being short-listed for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award and long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her work – including art reviews, cultural features, book reviews, fiction and poetry – has featured in a wide number of national magazines and newspapers. She is presently working on a novel, Seahorse.
Kavery Nambisan is from the Coorg district in Karnataka. She did her higher surgical training in the UK, where she obtained the fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons from London. Since then, she has worked in various rural areas in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Her most recent novel, The Story That Must Not Be Told was short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the DSC South Asian Literature Prize. She was invited to Greece for a Fulbright-sponsored Symposium on ‘Home/Homelands’ in 2008. Her forthcoming novel is A Town Like Ours.
Lavanya Sankaran is the author of the celebrated short story collection The Red Carpet that garnered critical praises world-wide. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, her debut novel, The Hope Factory, was selected by Amazon UK as a top pick. Lavanya’s writing has won several awards, including Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers, and Poets and Writers’ Best First Fiction Award. Her opinion pieces and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian and the Atlantic. Lavanya sponsors the annual Lavanya Sankaran Writing Fellowship at the Sangam Writers Residency, which she hopes will encourage new writers in India.
Maniza Naqvi, born in Lahore, Pakistan, is the author of four published novels – Mass Transit; On Air; Stay With Me; A Matter of Detail and a book of short stories, essays and poems Sarajevo Saturdays. Her short stories, poems and essays have been published in various anthologies including Shattering Stereotypes and Neither Night Nor Day. She conceptualized and edited the book Festival; Karachi: Ours Stories in Our Words and is editing a book of short stories by new authors from Pakistan. She is a regular Monday column writer for 3quarksdaily.com
Manju Kapur taught English literature in Miranda House College, Delhi University for over twenty-five years. Her first novel, Difficult Daughters was published in 1998, and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize for best first novel, Eurasia region. Her second novel, A Married Woman was published in 2002 and shortlisted for the Encore Award; her third, Home in 2006, was shortlisted for the Hutch-Crossword prize, and the fourth, The Immigrant, (2008) was shortlisted for the India Plaza Golden Quill Award and the DSC Prize of South Asian Literature in 2010. Her fifth novel Custody, published in 2011 has been bought by Balaji Telefilms.
Meira Chand is of Indian–Swiss heritage and was born and educated in London. She has lived in Japan, and India but now resides in Singapore. Her multi-cultural heritage is reflected in her eight novels. In the UK her latest novel, A Different Sky was a book-of-the-month choice by the bookshop chain Waterstones, long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and on Oprah Winfrey’s reading list. She has a PhD in creative writing and is an associate member of the Centre for the Arts, National University of Singapore. She is involved in programmes in Singapore to nurture and promote young writers and has been chairperson for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for the region of Southeast Asia.
Mishi Saran majored in Chinese Studies at Wellesley College and moved to Shanghai in 2006. Her first book – a travelogue – Chasing the Monk’s Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang, was shortlisted for the 2006 Hutch Crossword Book Award. Her novel, The Other Side of Light was shortlisted for the 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize.
Moni Mohsin was born and raised in Lahore. She started her writing career at the Friday Times, Pakistan’s first independent weekly, where she served as the features editor. She is now a freelance journalist and author of two novels, the prize-winning The End of Innocence and Duty Free. Her best-selling collection of satirical columns, The Diary of a Social Butterfly, is based on her long-running column for the Friday Times. She is married with two children and divides her time between London and Lahore.
Namita Devidayal is a Mumbai-based journalist and author. She wrote the highly acclaimed memoir, The Music Room which won the Crossword Book Award and was Outlook book of the year. She also wrote the best-selling novel Aftertaste which was long-listed for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. She is a consulting editor with the Times of India, where she covers a range of subjects. She is also a trained classical singer. Namita graduated from Princeton University in the US.
Ru Freeman is a Sri Lankan born writer whose creative and political work has appeared internationally. She is the author of the novels A Disobedient Girl and On Sal Mal Lane, both of which have been translated into several languages including Italian, French, Hebrew, Turkish and Chinese. She blogs for the Huffington Post on literature and politics, is a contributing editorial board member of the Asian American Literary Review, and teaches creative writing at Columbia University.
Shashi Deshpande has several books to her credit; three of her novels have received awards, including the Sahitya Akademi Award for That Long Silence. Her latest novel is Shadow Play. Her work has been translated into several Indian and European languages. She has participated in literary conferences and festivals, as well as lectured in universities, both in India and abroad. She was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2008.
Shinie Antony has written two collections of short fiction, two novels and compiled two anthologies. She won the Commonwealth Asia region prize for short-story writing in 2003 for A Dog’s Death. She is a co-founder of the Bangalore Literature Festival and editor of the festival magazine, Beantown.
Susan Vishwanathan teaches sociology at Centre for the Study of Social Systems at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is the author of The Christians of Kerala, Friendship, Interiority and Mysticism; The Children of Nature: The Life of Ramana Maharshi; and Reading Marx, Weber and Durkheim Today. Susan is also a fiction writer, Nelycinda and Other Stories being her latest work. She has been a fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, an honorary fellow of Indian Institute of Advances Studies, and visiting professor to Fondation maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris and to Université Paris 13, and to Freie Universität, Berlin.
Tania James is the author of Aerogrammes and Other Stories and the novel Atlas of Unknowns, a finalist for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her stories and essays have appeared in Boston Review, Granta, Elle India, National Geographic India, and the New York Times. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She was a Fulbright fellow to India (2011–12), and currently lives in Washington DC.
Tishani Doshi was born in erstwhile Madras, now Chennai. She received her masters in writing from Johns Hopkins University and worked in London in advertising before returning to India in 2001. In 2006, her book of poems Countries of the Body won the Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection in the UK. Her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers, has been translated into several languages and was long-listed for the Orange Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and short-listed for the Hindu Literary Prize. Her latest books include a collection of poems, Everything Begins Elsewhere, and a retelling of a medieval Welsh myth, Fountainville.