Anita Desai

Indian novelist and short story writer, Anita Desai is specially noted for her insightful depiction of the inner life of the female characters in her writings. In many of her works Anita Desai has highlighted the tensions among the family members and estrangement of middle-class women. Anita Desai marked her debut as a novelist in the year 1963 with the Peacock. It was followed by Voices of the City; Fire on the Mountain (set in Kasuli, a hill station), "In Clear Light of Day, Where Shall We Go This Summer, and The Zigzag Way. Anita Desai's works were short listed for the Booker prize 3 times.Anita Desai is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London and she has been a member of the Advisory Board for English at the National Academy of Letters in Delhi and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has been a Visiting Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, England and has taught writing at Smith College. Anita Desai has been the Purington Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College in the United States.BackgroundAnita Desai was born in 1937, Mussoorie, India. Her father was a Bengali businessman whereas her mother was of German origin. Anita Desai began to write at the age of seven. When she was just 9 years old she published her first story. Anita Desai was educated in Delhi at Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School and Miranda House, Delhi University (B.A. in English literature). She married Ashvin Desai, a businessman.

Amitav Ghosh

India born Amitav Ghosh is a world renowned novelist and author. In his writing, Amitav Ghosh demonstrates the mixture and interstitial nature of cultures, as expressed through language. Like many subaltern authors, Amitav Ghosh endeavors to recuperate the silenced voices of those not represented in the historical record. Amitav Ghosh has held academic positions at a number of universities, including the Delhi University and the Columbia University. At present Ghosh is a distinguished professor at the Queens College, New York University. Amitav Ghosh has received numerous awards for his works. Some of these awards are Prix Medicis Etranger for The Circle of Reason (1986), the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Shadow Lines (1988), the Arthur C. Clarke Prize for science fiction for The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), the Pushcart Prize for his essay, "The March of the Novel through History: My Father's Bookcase" and the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards for The Glass PalaceAmitav's latest work of fiction, The Hungry Tide was published in April 2004. Other prominent works of Amitav are - The Shadow Lines (1990), In An Antique Land (1994), The Circle of Reason (1986), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), and The Glass Palace (2000). Ghosh also has written three works of non-fiction. They are Countdown (on India's nuclear policy) The Imam and the Indian (a collection of essays on different themes like fundamentalism, history of the novel, Egyptian culture and literature) and Dancing in Cambodia.BackgroundAmitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta. His father was in the Indian army. It was mainly because of this reason that Amitav Ghosh got the chance to visit a number of countries including Sri Lanka, Iran and Bangladesh. Amitav Ghosh did schooling from the Doon school, Dehra Dun. He completed his graduation from St. Stephens College, Delhi University. After leaving St. Stephen's with a B.A. in History in 1976, he obtained an M.A. in Sociology from the Delhi University in 1978. He went to St. Edmund Hall, Oxford pursue postgraduate work and in 1979 obtained a diploma in social anthropology. He also spent some time at Tunis where he learnt Arabic. Amitav Ghosh was awarded his Oxford D. Phil. in Social Anthropology for his thesis on "Kinship in Relation to the Economic and Social Organization of an Egyptian Village Community" in 1981. Amitav Ghosh lives in New York with his wife, Deborah Baker, the author of In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993) and a senior editor at Little Brown and Co., and his children Leela and Nayan.

Vikram SethPoet

Novelist
Vikram Seth was born in Calcutta in 1952. He earned degrees in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University. He has published 6 books of poetry and 3 novels since 1980. His novel "A suitable boy" won the W.H.Smith prize in 1993. The latest novel written by Vikram Seth is 'An Equal music' and it is about the troubled love life of a violinist.
Vikram Seth received one of Britain top honours for his services to literature. The award of the commander of the order3 of the British Empire was announced earlier in the year by Queen Elizabeth II and given to Seth on 14 February 2001.
Vikram Seth creates a living, breathing world that enchants and grips the reader in all his novels.

Shashi Tharoor

Writer and UN Diplomat
Shri Shashi Tharoor, is a well-known Indian English writer, scholar and international civil servant. He was born in London on May 1956 to father, a newspaper executive and mother a housewife, with their roots in Palakkad, a town in Kerala, India.
Tharoor mostly grew up in India did his schooling and under graduation in cities such as Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi. He completed his honors degree in History from the prestigious St. Stephen's College in Delhi and won a scholarship to Tufts University in Boston. As a student he took part in debates, quiz contests and also tried his hand in theatre. In the mid 1970's, he went to the United States and acquired two master's degrees and a Ph.D. in Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University, all by the age of twenty-two.
Tharoor joined the United Nations in May 1978 in the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva and has been with the organisation since then. He became the head of UNHCR Singapore office (1981-1984) at the peak of the Vietnamese "boat people" crisis. Then he served as Special Assistant to the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations from 1989 to1996 at UN headquarters in New York, towards the end of the term from 1991 to 1996, he led the team responsible for peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia. He served as the Executive Assistant to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (1997-1998) and as the Director of Communications and Special projects in the office of the Secretary-General from 1998 to 2001. In January 2001, he was appointed as interim head of the Department of Public Information (DPI) by Kofi Annan, and after a year and a half was confirmed as the Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information of the United Nations. In this capacity, he is responsible for the communication strategy, enhancing the image and effectiveness of the organisation. In 2003, the Secretary-General appointed him United Nations Coordinator for Multilingualism.
As a journalist, Tharoor has written many articles, short stories, literary reviews and commentaries in such publications as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, the Times of India, the Indian Express, and Foreign Affairs. As a writer, he is very much an Indian expatriate. Shashi Tharoor has explored the diversity of culture in his native India. By exploring the themes of India's past and its relevance to the future, he has produced both works of fiction and nonfiction. He is the winner of several journalism and literary awards, including Commonwealth Writers' prize. In 1998, the Association of Indians in America (AIA) and the Network of Indian Professionals (NetIP) awarded him the Excelsior Award for Excellence in Literature. He was named by the World Economic forum in Davos as a Global Leader of Tomorrow. He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in International Affairs from the University of Puget Sound in May 2000.
Mr. Tharoor is also the author of several books, including 'Reasons of State' (1982), a scholarly study of Indian foreign policy; 'The Great Indian Novel (1989)', a modern ironic adaptation of the 2000-year-old Indian epic 'Mahabharata' which is narrated from a 20th century viewpoint; 'The Five-Dollar Smile & Other Stories' (1990); a second novel, 'Show Business' (1992) filmed in 1994 under the title 'Bollywood' which is a satire on the Indian film industry, which received a front-page accolade from The New York Times Book Review; 'India: From Midnight to the Millennium' (1997), published on the 50th anniversary of India's independence; 'Riot. A Love Story'(2001) which is about a married American government official who have a secret love affair and 'Nehru, the Invention of India'. He has also published a collection of short stories.
On the personal front, he has separated from his journalist wife Tilottama who lives with their twin sons, Ishaan and Kanishk. Though Shashi Tharoor has been out of India since he was a teenager, he retains a strong attachment to his Indian roots. This versatile personality now lives in New York, balancing his career at the UN as well as his life as an author with equal brilliance and ease.

Arundhati Roy

Writer & Social Activist
Susanna Arundhati Roy the first Indian woman to have won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, was born on 24th November 1961 in Bengal and grew up in Aymanam village, Kottayam, Kerala.
She was born to parents Mary Roy a well known social activist who won a landmark Supreme Court verdict that granted Christian women in Kerala the right to their parent's property and father a Bengali Hindu tea planter. Arundhati's parents separated when she was small and she did her formal education in Corpus Christi school run by her mother in Kottayam District, Kerala. When she was just 16, she left her home and settled in Delhi. There she did her degree in Architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture. During this period she met Gerard Da Cunha a fellow architecture student and married him but their marriage lasted only four years. After a brief stint in the field of architecture, she found that it was not for her. She left for Goa, making a life out at the beach, got tired of it after a few months, came back to Delhi. She took a job at the National Institute of Urban Affairs, met Pradeep Krishen, a film director now her husband who offered her a small role in 'Massey Saab'. She went to Italy on a scholarship for eight months to study the restoration of monuments. She realised she was a writer during those months in Italy.
After she returned from Italy she worked with Pradeep Krishen and they planned an episode television for Doordarshan called the 'Banyan Tree' which didn't materialise and was shelved by the producers after shooting 2-3 episodes. She wrote and starred in 'In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones', a film on college life in India, based on her experiences in the University of Delhi, and wrote the screenplay for Pradip Krishen's film 'Electric Moon' (1992). She quickly became known for her work as screenwriter. Then she wrote a series of essays called 'The Great Indian Rape Trick' which attracted media attention, in defense of former dacoit Phoolan Devi, who she felt had been exploited by Shekhar Kapur's film 'Bandit Queen'. Then came her debut novel 'The God of Small Things' which shot her into prominence in 1997, by winning the prestigious British Booker prize in London and becoming an international best seller. The book, which took almost five years to complete, gives an insight to the social and political life in a village in South India through the eyes of seven year old twins and how it effects/disrupts their small lives. The book won £20,000 as prize and sold nearly 400,000 copies globally by October that year.
In the years following her success, she has turned to activism, writing 'The Cost of Living' a book comprising two essays 'The Greater Common Good'(1999) and 'The End of Imagination'(1998); the former against Indian Governments massive dam projects which displaced millions of poor people and the latter; its testing of Nuclear weapons. She has been an active participant in public demonstrations against the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada river in Western India and has donated a substantial amount around 1.5million rupees, equivalent to her Booker Prize money, for the cause. She was even arrested along with other protestors for campaigning for the cause. 'Power Politics' her latest book published, takes on Enron the power corporation based in Houston trying to take over Maharashtra's energy sector. She has also spoken on and published several articles such as 'Promotion of equal rights' supporting equal rights for lower caste in India and 'War on Terrorism' (2001)against the Iraq war.
With her latest publications, Arundhati is carving a niche for herself as a political journalist. This unusual women who has been on several lists of 'the 50 most beautiful women in the world' is not intimated by her success and fame but is an inspiration to all those who seek to speak up against the powers in support of the poor and the oppressed. She now lives in Delhi with her husband Pradip Krishen and his two daughters Pia and Mithva from a previous marriage.