Anita Desai
Anita Desai was born in 1937. Her published works include adult novels, children's books and short stories. She is a member of the Advisory Board for English of the National Academy of Letters in Delhi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London. Anita Mazumdar Desai is an Indian novelist and Emeritus John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker prize three times. Her daughter, the author Kiran Desai, is the winner of the 2006 Booker prize.
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Andrea Levy
Andrea Levy was an English novelist, born in London to Jamaican parents. Her novels chronicled the experiences of the post-World War II generation of Jamaican immigrants in Britain. She was one of the first black British authors to achieve both critical and commercial success. Her novel Small Island won several major literary prizes: the Orange Prize for women's fiction, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year award.
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Librarian's note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. -
LeAnne Howe
LeAnne Howe is the author of three books, including Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (Aunt Lute Books, 2007), and is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation. In 2006-2007 she was the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi at Oxford. She was the screenwriter for Indian Country Diaries: Spiral of Fire, a 90-minute PBS documentary released in November 2006. Howe's first novel, Shell Shaker (Aunt Lute Books, 2001), received an American Book Award in 2002. Her poetry collection, Evidence of Red (Salt Publishing, UK; 2005), was awarded the 2006 Oklahoma Book Award. Currently, Howe is Associate Professor and Interim Director of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and teaches in t
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Lily Tuck
Lily Tuck is an American novelist and short story writer whose novel The News from Paraguay won the 2004 National Book Award for Fiction. Her novel Siam was nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has published four other novels, a collection of short stories, and a biography of Italian novelist Elsa Morante (see "Works" below).
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An American citizen born in Paris, Tuck now divides her time between New York City and Maine; she has also lived in Thailand and (during her childhood) Uruguay and Peru. Tuck has stated that "living in other countries has given me a different perspective as a writer. It has heightened my sense of dislocation and rootlessness. ... I think this feeling is reflected in my characters, most of them wome -
Edyth Bulbring
Edyth Bulbring is an award-winning author of nine Young Adult novels: The Summer of Toffie and Grummer which was shortlisted for the English Academy's 2010 Percy FitzPatrick prize for Youth Literature (Oxford University Press, February 2008); Cornelia Button and the Globe of Gamagion (Jacana, April 2008); The Club (Jonathan Ball Publishers, September 2008); Pops and The Nearly Dead (Penguin, March 2010); Melly, Mrs Ho and Me (Penguin, September 2010); Melly, Fatty and Me which was awarded the English Academy's 2012 Percy FitzPatrick prize for Youth Literature (Penguin, September 2011); The Mark which was awarded the English Academy's 2016 Percy FitzPatrick Prize for Youth Literature (Tafelberg September 2014) and Snitch which won the 2017 M
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Mahesh Dattani
Mahesh Dattani is an Indian director, actor, playwright and writer. He wrote such plays as Final Solutions, Dance Like a Man, Bravely Fought the Queen, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai, Tara,Thirty Days in September and'The murder that never was', starring Dheiraj Kapoor. He is the first playwright in English to be awarded the Sahitya Akademi award. His plays have been directed by eminent directors like Arvind Gaur, Alyque Padamsee and Lillete Dubey. Dattani is also a film director. His debut film is Mango Souffle, adapted from one of his plays. He also wrote and directed the movie Morning Raaga.
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Olumide Popoola
London-based Nigerian-German Olumide Popoola is a writer, speaker and performer.
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Her publications include essays, poetry, the novella this is not about sadness (Unrast, 2010), the play text Also by Mail (edition assemblage, 2013), the short collection breach, which she co-authored with Annie Holmes (Peirene Press, 2016), as well as recordings in collaboration with musicians.
In 2004 she won the May Ayim Award in the category Poetry, the first Black German Literary Award. Olumide has a PhD in Creative Writing and has lectured in creative writing at various universities.
Her novel When We Speak of Nothing was published by Cassava Republic Press in July 2017. -
Nandini Sengupta
Nandini Sengupta is a Pondicherry-based writer and journalist. After a chance trip to the Ajanta and Ellora caves in 2007, she began researching third and fourth-century India which quickly deepened into an obsession with India's glorious past. She now lives in Pondicherry's quaint French quarter with her little daughter, Kiki. Her first book of fiction, The King Within, was published by HarperCollins India in 2017.
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Nilanjana Roy
Nilanjana Roy is the author of The Wildings, published by Aleph Book Company in 2012. This is her first novel and stars a clan of cats in Nizamuddin. A collection of literary journalism, How To Read In Indian, will be published by HarperCollins in 2013.
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Her column on the reading life for the Business Standard has run for over 15 years; she has also written columns for the International Herald Tribune and the Kolkata Telegraph on gender issues in India. Over a decade-and-a-half in media and publishing, Nilanjana has been chief editor at Westland/ Tranquebar, edited and contributed to the Outlook Books page, Biblio and several other literary magazines/ periodicals, served on the jury for the Crossword Prize and the DSC Prize among others, and -
Deborah Rodriguez
Deborah Rodriguez is a hairdresser, a motivational speaker, and the author of the bestselling memoir Kabul Beauty School.
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She spent five years teaching at and later directing the Kabul Beauty School, the first modern beauty academy and training salon in Afghanistan. Rodriguez also owned the Oasis Salon and the Cabul Coffee House.
She currently lives in Mexico. -
Jennifer Berry Hawes
Jennifer Berry Hawes writes for the Charleston-based Post and Courier, where she spent a decade covering religion and now works on a team that handles in-depth investigative reporting projects for the newspaper.
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Her work has won many honors including a Pulitzer Prize, a George Polk Award, a National Headliner Award, and a Dart Award for Journalism & Trauma. She lives in Charleston, S.C. -
Jane Gardam
Jane Mary Gardam was an English writer of children's and adult fiction and literary critic. She also penned reviews for The Spectator and The Telegraph, and wrote for BBC Radio. She lived in Kent, Wimbledon, and Yorkshire. She won numerous literary awards, including the Whitbread Award twice. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 New Year Honours.
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Ruby Lal
Ruby Lal is professor of South Asian history at Emory University. She is the author of Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, and Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness.
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Jeannette Haien
After more than thirty-five years as a professional concert pianist and music teacher, Jeannette Haien, in her 60s, began her second career as a novelist. Her first novel, The All of It, published in 1986, garnered the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the Academy of Arts and Letters.
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Born in Dayton, Ohio, to a Dutch immigrant-industrialist father and a violinist mother, she received a bachelor's degree in English and a masters degree in music from the University of Michigan.
Jeannette performed extensively as a pianist throughout the Midwest before and immediately after her 1948 marriage to Ernest Ballard. In 1950, the Ballards moved to New York City, from then on their permanent home. Pursuing her professional career under her maide -
Ruthvika Rao
Ruthvika Rao is from Hyderabad, India. She is the author of The Fertile Earth, which was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Chautauqua prize, and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas prize.
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Amrita Mahale
Amrita Mahale was born in Mumbai and grew up in five cities across India. Milk Teeth, her first novel, was published to widespread acclaim in 2018 and was longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature and shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award for Fiction. Her second novel, Real Life, was published by Penguin Random House India in July 2025. Amrita was trained as an aerospace engineer at IIT Bombay and Stanford University.
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Mohsin Hamid
Mohsin Hamid is the author of four novels, Moth Smoke , The Reluctant Fundamentalist , How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia , and Exit West , and a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations .
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His writing has been featured on bestseller lists, adapted for the cinema, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, selected as winner or finalist of twenty awards, and translated into thirty-five languages.
Born in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California. -
Rémy Ngamije
Rémy Ngamije is a Rwandan-born Namibian author, editor, publisher, photographer, literary educator, and entrepreneur. His debut novel The Eternal Audience Of One was first published in South Africa by Blackbird Books and is available worldwide from Scout Press (S&S). In 2022 it was honoured with a Special Mention at the inaugural Grand Prix Panafricain De Litterature and won the inaugural African Literary Award from the Museum of the African Diaspora.
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Only Stars Know The Meaning Of Space, his collection of award-winning fiction, will be published in December, 2024 by Scout Press (S&S).
He won the Africa Regional Prize of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and was shortlisted for the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing in 2021 and 2020. H -
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998) was an American journalist, writer, feminist, and environmentalist, known for her staunch defense of the Everglades against efforts to drain it and reclaim land for development. Moving to Miami as a young woman to work for The Miami Herald, Douglas became a freelance writer, producing over a hundred short stories that were published in popular magazines. Her most influential work was the book, The Everglades: River of Grass, which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river, instead of a worthless swamp; its impact has been compared to that of Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring.
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Devika Rege
Devika Rege is the author of Quarterlife. The novel came out in India in 2023, where it was hailed as 'a landmark novel' by The Indian Express. It was also a finalist for five literary awards, eventually winning the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award and the Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman. It was published in the USA by Liveright in 2024. Devika is a graduate of the universities of Mumbai and Iowa, and lives in Bangalore.
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Fakir Mohan Senapati
Fakir Mohan Senapati (Odia: ଫକୀର ମୋହନ ସେନାପତି), often referred to as Utkala Byasa Kabi (Odisha's Vyasa), was an Indian writer, poet, philosopher and social reformer. He played a leading role in establishing the distinct identity of Odia, a language mainly spoken in the Indian state of Odisha. Fakirmohan Senapati is regarded as the father of Odia nationalism and modern Odia literature.
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Mulk Raj Anand
Mulk Raj Anand was an Indian writer in English, notable for his depiction of the lives of the poorer castes in traditional Indian society. One of the pioneers of Indo-Anglian fiction, he, together with R.K. Narayan, Ahmed Ali and Raja Rao, was one of the first India-based writers in English to gain an international readership. Anand is admired for his novels and short stories, which have acquired the status of being classic works of modern Indian English literature, noted for their perceptive insight into the lives of the oppressed and their analyses of impoverishment, exploitation and misfortune. He is also notable for being among the first writers to incorporate Punjabi and Hindustani idioms into English.
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Ahmed Ali
Ahmed Ali (1910 in New Delhi – 14 January 1994 in Karachi) (Urdu: احمد علی ) was a Pakistani novelist, poet, critic, translator, diplomat and scholar. His writings include Twilight in Delhi (1940), his first novel.
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Born in Delhi, British India, Ahmed Ali was educated at Aligarh and Lucknow universities, graduating with first-class and first in the order of merit in both B.A. (Honours), 1930 and M.A. English, 1931. He taught at leading Indian universities including Lucknow and Allahabad from 1932–46 and joined the Bengal Senior Educational Service as professor and head of the English Department at Presidency College, Calcutta (1944–47). Ali was the BBC's Representative and Director in India during 1942–45. During the Partition of India, he w -
Samhita Arni
Samhita Arni has been interested in Hindu mythology since she was a child. She has written The Mahabaharata: A Child’s View, a version of another great Indian epic, which has been translated into seven languages and was named Book of the Month by the German Academy for Youth Literature and Media, and one of the Best Published Books of 2004 by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. It also won the Elsa Morante Literary Award (Department of Culture, Campania, Italy). Samhita has also written scripts for film and television and is currently working on a thriller based on The Ramayana. She lives in Bangalore, India.
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Shubhangi Swarup
Shubhangi Swarup is a journalist and educationist. She was awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship for Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and has also won awards for gender sensitivity in feature writing. She lives in Mumbai.
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Elaine Kraf
Elaine Kraf is the author of four books: The Princess of 72nd Street, Find Him!, I Am Clarence, and The House of Madelaine.
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Jessica Francis Kane
Jessica Francis Kane’s new novel, FONSECA, will be published by Penguin Press on August 12, 2025. It is based on the mysterious trip to northern Mexico made by English writer Penelope Fitzgerald in 1952 and took Kane eight years to write! It has been named a most-anticipated book of 2025 by the Los Angeles Times, LitHub, Publisher's Weekly and others.
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Her previous novel, RULES FOR VISITING, was a 2019 Indie Next Pick and became a national bestseller. It was named one of the best books of the year by Oprah Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Vulture, The Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, Southern Living, Real Simple, The Today Show, and Good Morning America. In the UK it was published by Granta Books and was a finalist -
Barbara O'Brien
Barbara O'Brien is a pseudonym for a woman who experienced a six-month psychotic break during the 1950s and wrote about it in Operators and Things.
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Leanne Shapton
Leanne Shapton is an illustrator, author and publisher based in New York City. She is the co-founder, with photographer Jason Fulford, of J&L Books, an internationally-distributed not-for-profit imprint specializing in art and photography books. Shapton grew up in Mississauga, Ontario, and attended McGill Univesity and Pratt Institute. After interning at SNL, Harper's Magazine and for illustator James McMullan, she began her career at the National Post where she edited and art-directed the daily Avenue page, an award-winning double-page feature covering news and cultural trends. She went on to art direct Saturday Night, the National Post's weekly news magazine.
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In 2003, Shapton published her first book of drawings, titled Toronto. From 2006 -
Mulk Raj Anand
Mulk Raj Anand was an Indian writer in English, notable for his depiction of the lives of the poorer castes in traditional Indian society. One of the pioneers of Indo-Anglian fiction, he, together with R.K. Narayan, Ahmed Ali and Raja Rao, was one of the first India-based writers in English to gain an international readership. Anand is admired for his novels and short stories, which have acquired the status of being classic works of modern Indian English literature, noted for their perceptive insight into the lives of the oppressed and their analyses of impoverishment, exploitation and misfortune. He is also notable for being among the first writers to incorporate Punjabi and Hindustani idioms into English.
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Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British and American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.
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After his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie became the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, including a fatwa calling for his death issued by Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran. In total, 20 countries bann -
Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh is an Indian writer. He won the 54th Jnanpith award in 2018, India's highest literary honour. Ghosh's ambitious novels use complex narrative strategies to probe the nature of national and personal identity, particularly of the people of India and South Asia. He has written historical fiction and non-fiction works discussing topics such as colonialism and climate change.
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Ghosh studied at The Doon School, Dehradun, and earned a doctorate in social anthropology at the University of Oxford. He worked at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi and several academic institutions. His first novel, The Circle of Reason, was published in 1986, which he followed with later fictional works, including The Shadow Lines and The Glass Palace. -
Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer who is also an activist who focuses on issues related to social justice and economic inequality. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, and has also written two screenplays and several collections of essays.
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For her work as an activist she received the Cultural Freedom Prize awarded by the Lannan Foundation in 2002. -
Natalia Ginzburg
Natalia Ginzburg (née Levi) was an Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. Most of her works were also translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and United States. An activist, for a time in the 1930s she belonged to the Italian Communist Party. In 1983 she was elected to Parliament from Rome as an Independent.
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Ana Castillo
Ana Castillo (June 15, 1953-) is a celebrated and distinguished poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scholar. Castillo was born and raised in Chicago. She has contributed to periodicals and on-line venues (Salon and Oxygen) and national magazines, including More and the Sunday New York Times. Castillo’s writings have been the subject of numerous scholarly investigations and publications. Among her award winning, best sellling titles: novels include So Far From God, The Guardians and Peel My Love like an Onion, among other poetry: I Ask the Impossible. Her novel, Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has been profiled and interviewed on National Public Radio and t
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Kiran Desai
Kiran Desai is an Indian author who is a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the United States. She is the daughter of the noted author Anita Desai.
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Desai's first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), gained accolades from notable figures including Salman Rushdie, and went on to receive the Betty Trask Award. Her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006), won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. -
Michelle Cliff
Michelle Cliff (born 2 November 1946) is a Jamaican-American author whose notable works include No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng and Free Enterprise.
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Cliff also has written short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various, complex identity problems that stem from post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic, individual identity despite race and gender constructs. Cliff is a lesbian who grew up in Jamaica.
Cliff was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946 and moved with her family to New York City three years later. She was educated at Wagner College and the Warburg Institute at the University of London. She has held academic positions at several colleges including Trinity College an -
William Dalrymple
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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William Dalrymple was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of the Firth of Forth. He wrote the highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu when he was twenty-two. The book won the 1990 Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award; it was also shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.
In 1989 Dalrymple moved to Delhi where he lived for six years researching his second book, City of Djinns, which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. From the Holy Mountain, his acclaimed study of the demise of Christianity in its Middle Eastern homeland, was -
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Buchi Emecheta
Buchi Emecheta OBE was a Nigerian novelist who has published over 20 books, including Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Her themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education have won her considerable critical acclaim and honours, including an Order of the British Empire in 2005. Emecheta once described her stories as "stories of the world…[where]… women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical."
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From 1965 to 1969, Emecheta worked as a library officer for the British Museum in London. From 1969 to 1976 she -
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Pramoedya Ananta Toer was an Indonesian author of novels, short stories, essays, polemics, and histories of his homeland and its people. A well-regarded writer in the West, Pramoedya's outspoken and often politically charged writings faced censorship in his native land during the pre-reformation era. For opposing the policies of both founding president Sukarno, as well as those of its successor, the New Order regime of Suharto, he faced extrajudicial punishment. During the many years in which he suffered imprisonment and house arrest, he became a cause célèbre for advocates of freedom of expression and human rights.
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Bibliography:
* Kranji-Bekasi Jatuh (1947)
* Perburuan (The Fugitive) (1950)
* Keluarga Gerilya (1950)
* Bukan Pasarmalam (1951)
* C -
Ismat Chughtai
Ismat Chughtai (Urdu: عصمت چغتائی) (August 1915 – 24 October 1991) was an eminent Urdu writer, known for her indomitable spirit and a fierce feminist ideology. She was considered the grand dame of Urdu fiction, Along with Rashid Jahan, Wajeda Tabassum and Qurratulain Hyder, Ismat’s work stands for the birth of a revolutionary feminist politics and aesthetics in twentieth century Urdu literature. She explored feminine sexuality, middle-class gentility, and other evolving conflicts in the modern Muslim world. Her outspoken and controversial style of writing made her the passionate voice for the unheard, and she has become an inspiration for the younger generation of writers, readers and intellectuals.
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Jerry Pinto
Jerry Pinto is a Mumbai-based Indian writer of poetry, prose and children's fiction in English, as well as a journalist. His noted works include, Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb (2006) which won the Best Book on Cinema Award at the 54th National Film Awards, Surviving Women (2000) and Asylum and Other Poems (2003). His first novel Em and The Big Hoom was published in 2012.
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Mohammed Hanif
Mohammed Hanif is a Pakistani writer and journalist. He was born at Okara. He was graduated from Pakistan Air Force Academy as a pilot officer but subsequently left to pursue a career in journalism. He initially worked for Newsline, The Washington Post and India Today. In 1996, he moved to London to work for the BBC. Later, he became the head of the BBC's Urdu service in London.
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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed... -
R.K. Narayan
R. K. Narayan is among the best known and most widely read Indian novelists who wrote in English.
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R.K. Narayan was born in Madras, South India, in 1906, and educated there and at Maharaja's College in Mysore. His first novel, Swami and Friends and its successor, The Bachelor of Arts, are both set in the enchanting fictional territory of Malgudi and are only two out of the twelve novels he based there. In 1958 Narayan's work The Guide won him the National Prize of the Indian Literary Academy, his country's highest literary honor.
In addition to his novels, Narayan has authored five collections of short stories, including A Horse and Two Goats, Malguidi Days, and Under the Banyan Tree, two travel books, two volumes of essays, a volume of memoi -
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (Bengali: বঙ্কিম চন্দ্র চট্টোপাধ্যায়) ('Chattopadhyay' in the original Bengali; 'Chatterjee' as spelt by the British) was a Bengali poet, novelist, essayist and journalist, most famous as the author of Vande Mataram or Bande Mataram, that inspired the freedom fighters of India, and was later declared the National Song of India.
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Complete works of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (বঙ্কিম রচনাবলী) is now available in this third party website (in Bengali):
https://bankim-rachanabali.nltr.org/
Chatterjee is considered as a key figure in literary renaissance of Bengal as well as India. Some of his writings, including novels, essays and commentaries, were a breakaway from traditional verse-oriented Indian writings, and provi -
Martin Wickramasinghe
The search for roots is the central theme in Martin Wickramasinghe’s writings on the culture and life of the people of Sri Lanka. He imaginatively explored and applied modern knowledge in natural and social sciences, literature, linguistics, the arts, philosophy, education, and Buddhism and comparative religion to reach beyond the superficial emotionalism of vulgar nationalism, and guide us to the enduring roots of our common national identity that exists in the folklife and folk culture of Sri Lanka...
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Martin Wickramasinghe’s vision was primarily nurtured in the tolerant, humane, realistic attitude to life traditional to Buddhist folk culture. He valued the intellectual freedom and independence inspired by the Buddha’s ‘Kalama Sutta’ which -
Munshi Premchand
Munshi Premchand (Hindi: मुंशी प्रेमचंद) was an Indian writer famous for his modern Hindustani literature. He is one of the most celebrated writers of the Indian subcontinent,and is regarded as one of the foremost Hindustani writers of the early twentieth century.
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Born Dhanpat Rai, he began writing under the pen name "Nawab Rai", but subsequently switched to "Premchand", while he is also known as "Munshi Premchand", Munshi being an honorary prefix. A novel writer, story writer and dramatist, he has been referred to as the "Upanyas Samrat" ("Emperor among Novelists") by some Hindi writers. His works include more than a dozen novels, around 250 short stories, several essays and translations of a number of foreign literary works into Hindi.
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Banu Mushtaq
Banu Mushtaq (ಬಾನು ಮುಷ್ತಾಕ್, born 1948) is an activist, lawyer and writer from the southern Indian state of Karnataka. She writes in the Kannada language and her works have also been published in Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam and, most recently, English.
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Bruna Dantas Lobato
Bruna Dantas Lobato is a writer and translator. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, and The Common. She was awarded the 2023 National Book Award in Translation for The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel. She was born and raised in Natal, Brazil, and lives in St. Louis, Missouri. Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, is forthcoming in October 2024 from Grove Atlantic.
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Annie Liontas
Annie Liontas' debut novel, LET ME EXPLAIN YOU (Scribner) was selected by the ABA as an Indies Introduce 2015. She is the recent recipient of a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and her story “Two Planes in Love” was selected as runner-up in BOMB Magazine’s 2013 Fiction Prize Contest. Other stories and poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Night Train, and Lit. Since 2003, Annie has been dedicated to urban education, working with teachers and youth in Newark and Philadelphia. She co-hosts the TireFire Reading Series and lives with her wife in Philadelphia across the street from the best pizza jawn. Follow her @aliontas.
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Jan Carson
Jan Carson is a writer and community arts development officer currently based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has a BA in English Literature from Queen’s University Belfast and an MLitt. In Theology and Contemporary Culture from St. Andrew’s University, Scotland. Jan has had short stories published in literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic, has had two of her plays produced for the Belfast stage and is a current recipient of the Arts Council NI’s Artist’s Career Enhancement Bursary. Her first novel, “Malcolm Orange Disappears” will be published by Liberties Press, Dublin on June 2nd 2014.
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Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh is an Indian writer. He won the 54th Jnanpith award in 2018, India's highest literary honour. Ghosh's ambitious novels use complex narrative strategies to probe the nature of national and personal identity, particularly of the people of India and South Asia. He has written historical fiction and non-fiction works discussing topics such as colonialism and climate change.
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Ghosh studied at The Doon School, Dehradun, and earned a doctorate in social anthropology at the University of Oxford. He worked at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi and several academic institutions. His first novel, The Circle of Reason, was published in 1986, which he followed with later fictional works, including The Shadow Lines and The Glass Palace. -
Said Sayrafiezadeh
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is a memoirist, fiction writer and playwright. He is the author of the forthcoming story collection American Estrangement. His memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by Dwight Garner of The New York Times, and his debut story collection, Brief Encounters With the Enemy, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fiction Prize.
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His short stories and personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, Granta, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, and New American Stories, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction and a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers’ fiction fellowship.
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Bapsi Sidhwa
Bapsi Sidhwa was a Pakistani novelist who wrote in English and was resident in the United States.
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She was best known for her collaborative work with Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta: Sidhwa wrote both the 1991 novel Ice Candy Man which served as the basis for Mehta's 1998 film Earth as well as the 2006 novel Water: A Novel, on which Mehta's 2005 film Water is based. A documentary about Sidhwa's life called "Bapsi: Silences of My Life" was released on the official YouTube channel of " The Citizens Archive of Pakistan" on 28 October 2022 with the title " First Generation -Stories of partition: Bapsi Sidhwa". -
Kimberly King Parsons
KIMBERLY KING PARSONS is the author of the national-bestselling novel We Were the Universe, number two on TIME Magazine’s Best Books of 2024 and a Dakota Johnson Book Club pick the New York Times calls “a profound, gutsy tale of grief’s dismantling power.” Parsons’s debut collection, Black Light, was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and Columbia University, Parsons won the 2020 National Magazine Award for “Foxes,” a story published in The Paris Review. She lives with her partner and children in Portland, Oregon, and teaches fiction in the MFA Writing Program at Pacific University.
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Pura Belpré
Pura Belpré (February 2, 1899 – July 1, 1982) was the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York City. She was also a writer, collector of folktales, and puppeteer.
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Belpré was born in Cidra, Puerto Rico. There is some dispute as to the date of her birth which has been given as February 2, 1899, December 2, 1901 and February 2, 1903. Belpré graduated from Central High School in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1919 and enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, where she originally planned on becoming a teacher. But, in 1920, Belpré interrupted her studies to attend her sister Elisa's wedding in New York City, where she was recruited by a public library effort to hire young women from ethnically diverse backgrounds. This first job led to -
Anita Anand
Anita Anand is a British radio and television presenter, author, and journalist.
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Attia Hosain
Attia Hosain (1913–1998) was a writer, feminist and broadcaster. She was born in 1913 in Lucknow in a taluqdar background. She moved to Britain in 1947.
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Attia was born in Lucknow and went to the local La Martiniere Girls' College. She was the daughter of Sheikh Shahid Husain Kidwai and Nisar Fatima, the daughter of Syed Maqbool Hussain Alvi of Kakori.
She studied at Isabella Thoburn College from the age of fifteen and Lucknow University.
She moved to Britain in 1947 and became a broadcaster for the BBC, hosting a popular women's radio programme.
Attia's niece is the Pakistani author Muneeza Shamsie and her great-niece is author Kamila Shamsie. British television director Waris Hussein is her son and film producer Shama Habibullah is her daughte -
Elspeth Barker
Elspeth Barker was a novelist and journalist. She was educated in Scotland and at Oxford.
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Barker's novel O Caledonia won four awards and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. She has reviewed extensively and written features for the Independent on Sunday, Guardian, Sunday Times, Observer, LRB, TLS, Harpers & Queen, Scotland on Sunday, Country Living, Vogue, etc. She edited the anthology Loss for Dent/Orion in 1997.
Her first husband was the poet George Barker by whom she had five children, including the novelist Raffaella Barker. In 2007 she married the writer Bill Troop. -
Amos Tutuola
Amos Tutuola (20 June 1920 – 8 June 1997) was a Nigerian writer famous for his books based in part on Yoruba folk-tales.
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Despite his short formal education, Tutuola wrote his novels in English. His writing's grammar often relies more on Yoruba orality than on standard English. -
Homeira Qaderi
Homeira Qaderi is an Afghan writer, activist and educator. Her name is also written in English as Homeyra. She was born in Kabul, Afghanistan during the Russian occupation to an artist mother and a father who is a high school teacher.
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Anuradha Roy
Anuradha Roy was educated in Hyderabad, Calcutta and Cambridge (UK). She is an editor at Permanent Black, an independent press publishing in South Asian history, politics and culture. She lives mainly in Ranikhet, India, with her husband Rukun Advani and their dog, Biscoot.
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Charles M. Blow
New York Times columnist and television commentator. Former graphics director of the Times and art director of National Geographic magazine. Graduate of Grambling State University. Father of three amazing children. Resident of Brooklyn.
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Andrés N. Ordorica
Andrés N. Ordorica is a queer Latinx writer based in Edinburgh. His writing seeks to illuminate love and loss while unpacking what it means to be from ni de aquí, ni de allá. He is the author of the poetry collection At Least This I Know and Holy Boys and the novel How We Named the Stars. He has been shortlisted for the Kavya Prize, Morley Lit Prize, Mo Siewcharran Prize and Saltire Society’s Poetry Book of The Year. In 2024, he was selected as one of The Observer’s 10 Best Debut Novelists. The following year he was named by The Skinny as one of 12 of Scotland’s Next Generation of Writers.
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Michelle Cliff
Michelle Cliff (born 2 November 1946) is a Jamaican-American author whose notable works include No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng and Free Enterprise.
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Cliff also has written short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various, complex identity problems that stem from post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic, individual identity despite race and gender constructs. Cliff is a lesbian who grew up in Jamaica.
Cliff was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946 and moved with her family to New York City three years later. She was educated at Wagner College and the Warburg Institute at the University of London. She has held academic positions at several colleges including Trinity College an -
Ismat Chughtai
Ismat Chughtai (Urdu: عصمت چغتائی) (August 1915 – 24 October 1991) was an eminent Urdu writer, known for her indomitable spirit and a fierce feminist ideology. She was considered the grand dame of Urdu fiction, Along with Rashid Jahan, Wajeda Tabassum and Qurratulain Hyder, Ismat’s work stands for the birth of a revolutionary feminist politics and aesthetics in twentieth century Urdu literature. She explored feminine sexuality, middle-class gentility, and other evolving conflicts in the modern Muslim world. Her outspoken and controversial style of writing made her the passionate voice for the unheard, and she has become an inspiration for the younger generation of writers, readers and intellectuals.
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Martin Wickramasinghe
The search for roots is the central theme in Martin Wickramasinghe’s writings on the culture and life of the people of Sri Lanka. He imaginatively explored and applied modern knowledge in natural and social sciences, literature, linguistics, the arts, philosophy, education, and Buddhism and comparative religion to reach beyond the superficial emotionalism of vulgar nationalism, and guide us to the enduring roots of our common national identity that exists in the folklife and folk culture of Sri Lanka...
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Martin Wickramasinghe’s vision was primarily nurtured in the tolerant, humane, realistic attitude to life traditional to Buddhist folk culture. He valued the intellectual freedom and independence inspired by the Buddha’s ‘Kalama Sutta’ which -
Krupa Ge
Krupa Ge is a writer from Madras. She is the author of a novel, What We Know About Her (Context, 2021) and a narrative non-fiction book, Rivers Remember (Context, 2019).
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Mahabaleshwar Sail
Mahabaleshwar Sail was born on 4 August 1943 in Shejebag, Majali, Karnataka village of Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka. He was born in a family of agriculturalists. Sail's father was in the Army. Due to his father's demise, Sail had to leave schooling during his childhood and engage in agriculture. He started school at the age of six and dropped out in the eighth standard. Subsequently, he enrolled himself in the Indian Army. Sail also participated in the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 and was stationed at the Hussainiwala border.
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He also served as a United Nations peacekeeper between 1964–1965 at the border between Israel and Egypt. Sail has worked as a supervisor in the Forest Department. He was also in the Goa, Daman and Diu Police. Sail -
Arun Kolatkar
Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar (1932–2004) is one of the most important and influential poets in the post Independence Indian poetry. He was born on 1 November 1932 at Kolhapur, Maharastra. He had his education as a fine artist from JJ School of Arts and he worked as an art director and graphic designer in many reputed advertising agencies like Lintas. He wrote in Marathi and English.
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His Marathi poetry collections include:
* Arun Kolatkarcha Kavita (1977)
* Chirimiri (2004)
* Bhijki Vahi (2004)
* Droan (2004)
* Char Kavita
His first collection of English poems was Jejuri named after the religious site in Maharashtra (1976) and winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1977. His other collections of English poetry are Kala Ghoda Poems -
Muhammad Umar Memon
Muhammad Umar Memon is a critic, short story writer, renowned Urdu translator and editor of The Annual of Urdu Studies from Pakistan. He is Professor Emeritus of Urdu Literature and Islamic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Dr. Memon was born in Aligarh, India in 1939. In 1954, his family moved to Karachi, Pakistan where he earned his bachelors and masters degrees. After his graduation, he taught at Sachal Sarmast College and Sind University. In 1964 he won a Fulbright scholarship to the United States. This move enabled him to earn a masters degree from Harvard University and eventually a doctorate in Islamic Studies from UCLA. Dr. Memon joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1970 and retired from there after 38 years o -
Lucy Castle
Lucy Castle grew up devouring every single book from her local library before diving into the happy world of queer romances. Now she's writing her own blend of small-town love stories filled with hilarious banter, smirking men, and a dash of suspense.
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When she’s not writing, she’s drinking coffee, reorganizing her bookshelf, or pretending she doesn't still have a day job.
Her debut novel, Something You Like, kicks off the achingly funny Baywood Hearts series. -
Polly Rosenwaike
POLLY ROSENWAIKE has published stories, essays, and reviews in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, The New York Times Book Review, Glimmer Train, New England Review, The Millions, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the fiction editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review and lives in Ann Arbor with her family.
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Sheela Tomy
Sheela Tomy is a novelist and short-story writer from Kerala. She has a MA in Mass communication and Journalism. As a Malayalam short story writer, Sheela rose into prominence with her debut collection Melquiadesnte Pralayapusthakam (‘Melquiades’ Book of Floods’) in 2012. Valli is her debut novel which was awarded renowned Cherukad Award for Malayalam Literature 2021. ‘Valli’ in English was shortlisted for the JCB Award for Literature 2022 and Atta Galatta Banglore Literature Festival Book Prize 2022. ‘Valli’ also bagged O Abdulla translation award 2023. Sheela’s newest work, Aa Nadiyodu Preu Chodikkaruth (Do Not Ask the River Her Name), a novel addressing the struggle of people under siege, is well acclaimed. Sheela has resided in the Midd
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Kate Cooper
I'm so happy to share my newest book QUEENS OF A FALLEN WORLD with you. This history tells the story of the last years of the Roman Empire through the eyes of four women who left their mark on the world thanks to what is possibly the greatest autobiography of Latin literature, the fourth-century Christian bishop Augustine of Hippo’s CONFESSIONS.
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It's well known that Augustine had a close relationship with his mother Saint Monica, but the other women in Augustine’s life are equally fascinating. Piecing together their side of the story on the basis of fragmentary sources was a matter of detective work and a labour of love. A number of readers have said their story reads like a novel, but it it is all properly documented in the end notes!
I'm a -
Claribel Alegría
Clara Isabel Alegría Vides was a Nicaraguan poet, essayist, novelist, and journalist who is a major voice in the literature of contemporary Central America. She writes under the pseudonym Claribel Alegría. She was awarded the 2006 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
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(from Wikipedia) -
Daniel Hornsby
Daniel Hornsby was born in Muncie, Indiana. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, where he received Hopwood Awards for both short fiction and the novel, and an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of a novel, Via Negativa, and his stories and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Missouri Review, and Joyland. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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Karina Robles Bahrin
Karina Robles Bahrin got her first break as a writer when she guest edited a weekly teen column in The New Straits Times a very long time ago. Her short fiction has been published in venues such as Urban Odysseys: KL Stories, KL Noir: Blue, A Subtle Degree of Restraint & Other Stories and Malaysian Tales: Retold & Remixed. She is a former columnist with The Heat, a weekly by Focus Malaysia. She currently lives and works on the island of Langkawi, Malaysia. The Accidental Malay is her first novel.
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Diana Evans
Diana Evans was born and brought up in London. Her bestselling debut novel, 26a, won the inaugural Orange Award for New Writers and the British Book Awards deciBel Writer of the Year prize. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel, the Guardian First Book, the Commonwealth Best First Book and the Times/Southbank Show Breakthrough awards, and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, The Wonder, was also published to critical acclaim, described by The Times as ‘the most dazzling depiction of the world of dance since Ballet Shoes‘. Evans was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction for her third novel, Ordinary People, which was a New Yorker, New Statesman and Financial Ti
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Raja Rao
Raja Rao (Kannada: ರಾಜ ರಾವ್) has long been recognised as "a major novelist of our age." His five earlier novels—Kanthapura (1932), The Serpent and the Rope (1960), The Cat and Shakespeare (1965), Comrade Kirillov (1976) and The Chessmaster and His Moves (1988)—and three collections of short stories—The Cow of the Barricades and Other Stories (1947), The Policeman and the Rose (1978) and On the Ganga Ghat (1989)—won wide and exceptional international acclaim.
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Raja Rao was awarded the 1988 Neustadt International Prize for Literature which is given every two years to outstanding world writers. Earlier, The Serpent and the Rope won the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award, India's highest literary honour. More recently, Raja Rao was elected a Fell -
Khwaja Hasan Nizami
One of the few, and certainly the most prominent, of twentieth-century writers to
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have once again articulated the claim of Baba Nanak's Muslim identity was the
noted Delhi-based Muslim scholar, Khwaja Hasan Nizami (1879-1955). A learned
Sufi and a prolific writer, Nizami hailed from a family of hereditary custodians of
the shine of the renowned and widely-venerated Chishti mystic, Khwaja
Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi. Nizami's principal biographer, Mulla Wahidi, writes
that he had over five hundred books on an amazing variety of subjects to his
credit (quoted in Naqvi, 1978). A major concern in his writings was the defence
as well as the spread of Islam. With inter-communal relations rapidly
degenerating into ****** rioting all across north India in th -
Kavitha Rao
Kavitha Rao is a writer and a journalist, who writes on current affairs, arts, culture, people, and places. Her writings have been published in several national as well as international papers, including The National Time, The Guardian, New York Times, Elle India, Vogue India, and many more. For The Guardian, she writes a popular column titled Terra India, for which she won Asian Environmental Journalism Award. She is also a representative of a media training company that provides training for speaking in media.
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Amitava Kumar
Amitava Kumar is a novelist, poet, journalist, and Professor of English at Vassar College. He was born in Bihar, India; he grew up in the town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty, and delicious mangoes.
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He is the author of Nobody Does the Right Thing; A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb; Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Journey through India, Pakistan, Love, and Hate, a New York Times “Editors’ Choice” selection; Bombay—London—New York, a New Statesman (UK) “Book of the Year” selection; and Passport Photos. He is the editor of several books, including Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate, The Humour and the Pity: Essays on V. S. Naipaul, and World Bank Literature. He is also an editor of the online -
Tejaswini Apte-Rahm
Tejaswini Apte-Rahm is an award-winning writer from Mumbai, India. Her novel of historical fiction, The Secret of More, won the Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year Fiction Award 2023. It was also shortlisted in 2023 for the JCB Prize for Literature, Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Award and Tagore Literary Prize, and longlisted for the Kalinga Literature Festival Award.
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Her short story collection, These Circuses That Sweep Through the Landscape, was shortlisted in 2017 for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and the Tata-Nexon Literature Live! First Book Award.
She has co-authored an environmental education book for children, The Poop Book! , which was a Parag Honour Book 2020 and nominated for the Jarul Book Award 2021-22. It wa -
Sundar Sarukkai
Sundar Sarukkai is currently a Professor of philosophy at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. He was the Founding-Director of the Manipal Centre for Philosophy & Humanities, Manipal University, India from 2010-2015. He is the author of the following books: Translating the World: Science and Language, Philosophy of Symmetry, Indian Philosophy and Philosophy of Science, What is Science? and The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory (co-authored with Gopal Guru). He is an Editorial Advisory Board member of the Leonardo Book Series on science and art, published by MIT Press and the Series Editor for Science and Technology Studies, Routledge.
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Irawati Karve
Karve received a master's degree in sociology from Mumbai University in 1928 and a doctorate in anthropology from a university in Berlin, Germany in 1930.
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Karve served for many years as the head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Deccan College, Pune (University of Pune).
She presided over the Anthropology Division of the National Science Congress held in New Delhi in 1947.
She wrote in both Marathi and English on topics pertaining to sociology and anthropology, as well as on nonscientific topics.