The Purple Line is the debut novel of the Indian author Priyamvada N. Purushotham. It was published by HarperCollins India in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize in 2012. [1]
Set in Chennai, India, at the turn of the century, it is the tale of a gynaecologist who unearths the stories of six unlikely patients whose lives are intertwined without them knowing it. It deals with some of the gender issues facing the women of India today, including female foeticide and infanticide, and is considered by many to be an audacious exploration of womanhood. [2] [3] [4] [5]
Rohinton Mistry is an Indian-born Canadian writer. He has been the recipient of many awards including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2012. Each of his first three novels was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His novels to date have been set in India, told from the perspective of Parsis, and explore themes of family life, poverty, discrimination, and the corrupting influence of society.
Amitav Ghosh is an Indian writer. He won the 54th Jnanpith award in 2018, India's highest literary honor. 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 also written non-fiction works discussing topics such as colonialism and climate change.
William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple is a Delhi-based Scottish historian and art historian, as well as a curator, photographer, 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.
Kamila Shamsie FRSL is a Pakistani and British writer and novelist who is best known for her award-winning novel Home Fire (2017). Named on Granta magazine's list of 20 best young British writers, Shamsie has been described by The New Indian Express as "a novelist to reckon with and to look forward to." She also writes for publications including The Guardian, New Statesman, Index on Censorship and Prospect, and broadcasts on radio.
Anita Desai, born Anita Mazumdar, is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. She won the British 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.
Tabish Khair is an Indian English author and associate professor in the Department of English, University of Aarhus, Denmark. His books include Babu Fictions (2001), The Bus Stopped (2004), which was shortlisted for the Encore Award (UK) and The Thing About Thugs (2010), which has been shortlisted for a number of prizes, including the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Man Asian Literary Prize. His poem Birds of North Europe won first prize in the sixth Poetry Society All India Poetry Competition held in 1995. In 2022, he published a new Sci Fi novel, [The Body by the Shore].
The Costa Book Awards were a set of annual literary awards recognising English-language books by writers based in UK and Ireland. Originally named the Whitbread Book Awards from 1971 to 2005 after its first sponsor, the Whitbread company, then a brewery and owner of restaurant chains, it was renamed when Costa Coffee, then a subsidiary of Whitbread, took over sponsorship. The companion Costa Short Story Award was established in 2012. Costa Coffee was purchased by the Coca-Cola Company in 2018. The awards were abruptly terminated in 2022.
Anne Teresa Enright is an Irish writer. The first Laureate for Irish Fiction (2015–2018) and winner of the Man Booker Prize (2007), she has published seven novels, many short stories, and a non-fiction work called Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, about the birth of her two children. Her essays on literary themes have appeared in the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, and she writes for the books pages of The Irish Times and The Guardian. Her fiction explores themes such as family, love, identity and motherhood.
Poile Sengupta is a notable Indian writer in English. She is especially well-known as a playwright and writer for children. Her formal first name is Ambika but she writes, and is known, as Poile. Sengupta has been a college lecturer, a senior school teacher, an educational consultant, a communication and language skills consultant, a consultant editor for a market research firm, and a teacher for Montessori school children.
Tarun Tejpal is an Indian journalist, publisher, novelist and former editor-in-chief of Tehelka magazine. In November 2013, he stepped down as editor for six months after a female colleague accused him of sexual assault. On 21 May 2021, a Goa trial court presided over by Justice Kshama Joshi acquitted him of all charges.
Oneworld Publications is a British independent publishing firm founded in 1986 by Novin Doostdar and Juliet Mabey originally to publish accessible non-fiction by experts and academics for the general market. Based in London, it later added a literary fiction list and both a children's list and an upmarket crime list, and now publishes across a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, current affairs, popular science, religion, philosophy, and psychology, as well as literary fiction, crime fiction and suspense, and children's titles.
Arundhathi Subramaniam is an Indian poet and author, who has written about culture and spirituality.
Jerry Pinto is a Mumbai-based Indian-English poet, novelist, short story writer, translator, as well as journalist. Pinto's 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. Pinto won the Windham-Campbell prize in 2016 for his fiction. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2016 for his novel Em and the Big Hoom.
Jeet Thayil is an Indian poet, novelist, librettist and musician. He is the author of several poetry collections, including These Errors Are Correct (2008), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award. His first novel, Narcopolis, (2012), won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and The Hindu Literary Prize.
K. R. Meera is an Indian author and journalist, who writes in Malayalam. She was born in Sasthamkotta, Kollam district in Kerala. She worked as a journalist in Malayala Manorama but later resigned to concentrate more on writing. She started writing fiction in 2001 and her first short story collection Ormayude Njarambu was published in 2002. Since then she has published five collections of short stories, two novellas, five novels and two children's books. She won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 2009 for her short-story, Ave Maria. Her novel Aarachaar (2012) is widely regarded as one of the best literary works produced in Malayalam language. It received several awards including the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award (2013), Odakkuzhal Award (2013), Vayalar Award (2014) and Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award (2015). It was also shortlisted for the 2016 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.
Anuradha Roy is an Indian novelist, journalist and editor. She has written five novels: An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008), The Folded Earth (2011), Sleeping on Jupiter (2015), All the Lives We Never Lived (2018), and The Earthspinner (2021).
Anand Neelakantan is one of India's top selling authors with more than 15 books to his credit. Anand is also a columnist, screenwriter, and public speaker. He is known for writing mythological fiction and has authored fourteen books in English and one in Malayalam. He has also written screenplays for popular television series in Hindi on various GEC and OTT platforms. He has been writing a column named Acute Angle in the New Indian Express since 2017. Anand has acted in two Advertisement films and has also played the role of the antagonist Ettappa Naicker in the Doordarshan Television show Swaraj. He follows the style of telling stories based on the perspective of the antagonists or supporting characters of a larger work. His debut work Asura: Tale of the Vanquished (2012) was based on the Indian epic Ramayana, told from the perspective of Ravana—the first book in his Ramayana series. It was followed by series of books based on characters from Mahabharata and Baahubali. His books have been translated to different languages such as Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Assamese, English, Sinhalese, Burmese and Indonesian. Anand has written screenplays for popular Hindi television serials like Siya Ke Ram in Star TV, Mahabali Hanuman in SONY TV, Chakravarthy Ashoka in Colors TV, Sarfarosh in Netflix, Swaraj in DD National, Srimad Ramayan in Sony TV etc. He has written the story for the OTT series TAJ in Zee5
Anjali Joseph is an Indian novelist. Her first novel, Saraswati Park (2010), earned her several awards, including the Betty Trask Prize and Desmond Elliott Prize. Her second novel, Another Country, was released in 2012. In 2010, she was listed by The Telegraph as one of the 20 best writers under the age of 40. Her third novel, The Living (2016), was shortlisted for the DSC Prize and is a tender, lyrical and often funny novel which shines a light on everyday life. Her fourth novel, Keeping in Touch, was published in India in 2021 by Context and in the UK in 2022 by Scribe.
Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar is an Indian writer.
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a novel by Deepa Anappara, published in 2020. Her debut novel, it received wide praise and won the Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize in 2019. Djinn Patrol is shortlisted for the 2020 JCB Prize and was longlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. The novel won the 2021 Edgar Award for Best Novel.