Manjula Padmanabhan (1953– ) is an Indian playwright, journalist, and fiction writer. She has also illustrated more than twenty children’s books and created a long-running cartoon strip, Suki. Her play Harvest, about the sale of body parts and exploitative relations between developed and developing countries, won an Onassis Prize in 1997. Much of her written work encompasses a pronounced fantastical or science-fictional milieu, ranging from postapocalyptic stories to tales of vampires, monsters, and ogres. Across the span of her work, however, she is often praised for a wry, worldly sense of humor, even when describing sometimes sinister occurrences.
“Sharing Air” (1984) is a short, sharp shock of a story that acknowledges climate-change issues in a way that will resonate even more acutely for a modern-day audience.