William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple is an India-based Scottish historian and art historian, as well as a curator, broadcaster and critic. He is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the world's largest writers' festival, the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.
Anita Desai is an Indian novelist and Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Literature. She won the Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea (1983). Her other works include The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight. She is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London. Since 2020 she has been a Companion of Literature.
Pankaj Mishra is an Indian essayist, novelist, and socialist. His non-fiction works include Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond, along with From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, and A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and Its Neighbours, and he has published two novels. He is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, and prolific contributor to other periodicals such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. His writings have led to a number of controversies, including disputes with Salil Tripathi, Niall Ferguson and Jordan Peterson. He was awarded the Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction in 2014 and the Weston International Award in 2024.
Amitava Kumar is an Indian writer and journalist who is Professor of English, holding the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at Vassar College.
Sonali Gulati is an Indian American independent filmmaker, feminist, grass-roots activist, and educator.
Ramachandra "Ram" Guha is an Indian historian, environmentalist, writer and public intellectual whose research interests include social, political, contemporary, environmental and cricket history. He is an important authority on the history of modern India.The American Historical Association (AHA) has conferred its Honorary Foreign Member prize for the year 2019 on Ramchandra Guha. He is the third Indian historian to be recognised by the association.
The Jaipur Literature Festival, or JLF, is an annual literary festival which takes place in the Indian city of Jaipur each year in the month of January. It was founded in 2006.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is an English author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Mani Rao is an Indian poet and independent scholar, writing in English.
Arundhathi Subramaniam is an Indian poet and author, who has written about culture and spirituality.
Abhay Kumar is a career diplomat, poet, author, editor, translator, anthologist and artist. He has been appointed as India's first resident Ambassador to Georgia. He currently serves as the deputy director general of Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), New Delhi. He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 2003 after doing master's in geography at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Kirorimal College, Delhi University. He served as India's 21st ambassador to Madagascar and Comoros from 2019 to 2022 and as India's Deputy Ambassador to Brazil from 2016 to 2019. He earlier served as Spokesperson and First Secretary at the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu, Nepal from 2012 to 2016 and as Acting Consul General of India in Saint Petersburg, and Third/Second Secretary at Indian Embassy, Moscow, Russia from 2005 to 2010. He served as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy at the Ministry of External Affairs from 2010 to 2012 and sent out the first tweet on its behalf in 2010 starting a new era of India's Digital Diplomacy.
Meghna Pant is an Indian author, journalist and speaker. She has won a variety of awards for her contribution to literature, gender issues and journalism. In 2012, she won the Muse India National Literary Awards Young Writer Award for her debut novel One-and-a-Half Wife. Her collection of short stories, Happy Birthday and Other Stories was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Award.
Maya Jaggi is a British writer, literary critic, editor and cultural journalist. In the words of the Open University, from which Jaggi received an honorary doctorate in 2012, she "has had a transformative influence in the last 25 years in extending the map of international writing today". Jaggi has been a contributor to a wide range of publications including The Guardian, Financial Times, The Independent, The Literary Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, New Statesman, Wasafiri, Index on Censorship, and Newsweek, and is particularly known for her profiles of writers, artists, film-makers, musicians and others. She is also a broadcaster and presenter on radio and television. Jaggi is the niece of actor and food writer Madhur Jaffrey.
Perumal Murugan is an Indian writer, scholar and literary chronicler who writes in Tamil. He has written twelve novels, six collections of short stories, six anthologies of poetry and many non-fiction books. Ten of his novels have been translated into English: Seasons of the Palm, which was shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize in 2005, Current Show, One Part Woman, A Lonely Harvest, Trail by Silence, Poonachi or the Story of a Goat, Resolve, Estuary, Rising Heat, and Pyre He was a professor of Tamil at the Government Arts College in Salem Attur and Namakkal.
One Part Woman is a Tamil novel written by Indian writer Perumal Murugan titled "Mathorupagan" (மாதொருபாகன்). Initially published by Kalachuvadu Publications in 2010, it was later translated into English by Aniruddhan Vasudevan and published in 2013 in India by Penguin Books, and in 2018 in the US by Grove Atlantic. Set during the colonial era in the Southern state of Tamil Nadu in India, it deals with the social stigma that a married couple faces due to their childlessness, and the lengths they go to conceive.
Laurence Fearnley is a New Zealand short-story writer, novelist and non-fiction writer. Several of her books have been shortlisted for or have won awards, both in New Zealand and overseas, including The Hut Builder, which won the fiction category of the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards. She has also been the recipient of a number of writing awards and residencies including the Robert Burns Fellowship, the Janet Frame Memorial Award and the Artists to Antarctica Programme.
Pyre is a novel by Perumal Murugan that describes a love story within social caste-induced hatred. It was originally published in Tamil in 2013 and subsequently translated into English by Aniruddhan Vasudevan in 2016. The novel was longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2017. It was also selected for the International Booker Prize longlist 2023.
Daisy Rockwell is an American Hindi and Urdu language translator and artist. She has translated a number of classic works of Hindi and Urdu literature, including Upendranath Ashk's Falling Walls, Bhisham Sahni's Tamas, and Khadija Mastur's The Women's Courtyard. Her 2021 translation of Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand was the first South Asian book to win the International Booker Prize. Rockwell was awarded the 2023 Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award by the Vani Foundation and Teamwork Arts, during the 2023 edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Tomb of Sand also won her the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.
Anindita Ghose is an Indian author, journalist, and editor based in Mumbai. Her debut novel, The Illuminated, was published in 2021.
Jing Tsu is a Taiwanese-American author and professor of East Asian studies. Born in Taiwan, she immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. After receiving a PhD from Harvard University in East Asian languages and civilizations in 2001, she became a professor at Yale University.
