Aisha Rahman

Aisha worked in the Editorial department at HarperCollins Publishers for several years. Before moving to London, she was a lecturer at a university in Pakistan, where she taught a range of multidisciplinary courses, including a course on Pakistani Literature. Aisha ...

Amandeep Singh Madra

Amandeep Singh Madra is an independent researcher based in London. He has co-authored Warrior Saints: Three Centuries of the Sikh Military Tradition (1999). This was followed by another collaborative work Sicques, Tigers, or Thieves: Eyewitness Accounts of the Sikhs (1606-1809)

Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri is - according to the Guardian - "one of the leading novelists of his generation." He is also an internationally acclaimed essayist and musician. Amit has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Encore award, the Los Angeles Times Book ...

Anita Sethi

Anita Sethi is an award-winning journalist, writer and broadcaster who has written for many national and international newspapers and magazines including The Guardian, Observer, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The National, New ...

Anjali Joseph

Anjali Joseph was born in Bombay in 1978. She read English at Trinity College, Cambridge and has taught English at the Sorbonne. More recently she has written for The Times of India in Bombay and been a Commissioning Editor for ...

Ansuman Biswas

Ansuman Biswas was born in Calcutta and trained in the UK. He now has an international practice encompassing music, film, live art, installation, writing and theatre. With skills in a number of different fields, he has developed a dynamic practice ...

Arunava Sinha

Arunava Sinha is a translator of classic and contemporary Bengali fiction. His latest published translations are When The Time Is Right (Buddhadeva Bose) and Harbart (Nabarun Bhattacharya). His recent work includes The Chieftain’s Daughter (Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay) and Three Women (Rabindranath ...

Barbara Harrell-Bond

Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond OBE is a leading figure in the field of refugee studies. She founded the Refugee Studies Center at Oxford University, the world's first institution for the study of refugees. On retirement, she conducted research on the extent ...

Barry Miles

Barry Miles is an author who is known for his participation in the 1960s Underground movement in London and his subsequent writings about it; his book Hippie, for instance, is a reminiscence of the hippie sub-culture of the Sixties and ...

Bhavisha Morjaria

Bhavit Mehta

Bhavit studied Biological Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London, and worked at UCL before entering the world of children’s books in 2007 when he started his independent publishing house, 'Saadhak Books'. Taking inspiration from tales by his grandparents, his first ...

Bidisha

Bidisha is a writer, critic and broadcaster who began her career at 14, as a journalist for Arts and Style publications internationally. She signed her first book deal when she was 16. She presents and contributes to Arts shows and ...

Bobby Nayyar

Bobby Nayyar was born in Handsworth, Birmingham in 1979. In 2006, he was published in the anthology Mango Shake (Tindal Street Press) as well as in journals such as Wasafiri and Aesthetica. He’s been based in London since 2005 first ...

Bobby Singh Bansal

Boyd Tonkin

Boyd Tonkin is the Literary Editor of The Independent. Before joining the newspaper in 1996 he wrote for The Observer, was Literary Editor of the New Statesman, Features Editor of Community Care Magazine, and has also taught literature in higher ...

Christopher Ondaatje

Sir Christopher Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, educated inEngland and built a successful career in finance and publishing in Canada. In the early Nineties he sold all his business interests and turned to writing; he has broken new ground ...

Daljit Nagra

Daljit was born and brought up in West London and Sheffield. He lives in London, and works as a secondary school English teacher. In 2003, he won the Smith/Doorstop pamphlet competition with Oh My Rub!, under the pseudonym Khan Singh Kumar;

David Loyn

David Loyn has been a foreign correspondent for more than 25 years, mostly with the BBC. He has covered conflicts on three continents, and won major awards for both TV and radio reporting, including ‘Journalist of the Year’ in the ...

Dipika Rai

One of four children, Dipika Rai was born and educated in India. Her gypsy spirit was cultivated at a young age when she travelled throughout the country in a trusty Ambassador car with her family, bumping into all sorts of ...

Eisha Karol

Eisha is a songwriter, performer and a poet who writes for dancers. Her multimedia show SeaSuite: Ultraviolet - with influences from India, Brazil and beyond - has played in various incarnations at the Edinburgh Fringe, Indian Electronica Festival, Cargo, La ...

Farahad Zama

Farahad grew up in Vizag on the east coast of India, where his novels are set. He was recruited at university by a banking firm and has worked in Mumbai, Zurich and New York. Farahad moved to London in 1990 ...

Firoze Manji

Firoze Manji, a Kenyan, has more than thirty years of experience in international development, health, and human rights. He has formerly worked as programme director for the International Secretariat of Amnesty International, CEO for Aga Khan Foundation UK, and regional ...

Francesca Orsini

Francesca Orsini is Reader in the Literatures of North India at SOAS. Her main area of research is modern Hindi literature, where she has published on Hindi literary life during the nationalist period; commercial genres such as detective fiction and ...

Gautam Malkani

Gautam is the author of the novel Londonstani (2006) and has been a journalist at The Financial Times since 1998. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Time Out and Prospect Magazine. He was born and raised ...

H.M. Naqvi

H.M. Naqvi is the author of Home Boy, winner of the 2011 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He spent his childhood between Karachi, New York, Algiers and Islamabad. He graduated with a degree in Economics and English Literature and has ...

Hogarth Brown

Hogarth Brown was born and lives in Hackney. He graduated from Camberwell College of Art in 2005, where he studied both his Foundation and a BA in Graphic Design. Since then he has worked to cultivate and develop his own ...

Homa Khaleeli

Homa Khaleeli is a Commissioning Editor and writer at the Guardian. With an MA in South Asian studies at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, her interests include South Asian fiction, feminism and the Islamic world - but she ...

Ian Jack

Ian Jack edited Granta magazine between 1995 and 2007 and previously The Independent on Sunday, a newspaper he helped to found. He has been a judge of the Booker and Orwell prizes and chaired the judging panel for Granta’s Best ...

Irna Qureshi

Irna is an anthropologist, writer and oral historian specialising in British Asian heritage. She has collaborated on several exhibitions and books on this theme, including Home from Home: British Pakistanis in Mirpur, Coming of Age: 21 Years of Mela in ...

Isabel Losada

Isabel Losada has been an author for ten years and is published by Hodder, Random House, Bloomsbury X2, Summersdale, and a her most recent book, The Battersea Park Road to Paradise (May 2011) with Watkins / Duncan Baird. She is best ...

Jamila Gavin

Jamila Gavin was born in Mussoorie, India. She moved to England when she was 12 years old, and later studied music at Trinity College of Music, London. She then worked for the BBC, first in radio, then in television, as ...

John Baily

John Baily is currently Professor of Ehtnomusicology and Head of the Afghanistan Music Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London.  He came into ethnomusicology from experimental psychology, with a doctorate on human spatial coordination and motor control from the University of ...

Julian Stair

Julian Stair is a potter and writer with work in over 20 international public collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. He is currently working towards Quietus, an Arts Council England funded touring solo ...

Julie O’Yang

Julie O’Yang is a novelist and visual artist based in The Netherlands. Born and brought up in China, she came to Europe in 1990s to study at the University of London. Then she read Japanese Language and Culture at the ...

Justine Hardy

Justine Hardy has been a journalist for twenty-four years, many of those spent covering South Asia. She is the author of six books ranging in subject from war to Hindi film: The Ochre Border (1995) was about the reopening of ...

Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie was born in 1973 in Pakistan. Her first novel, In the City by the Sea, was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and her second, Salt and Saffron, won her a place on Orange's list ...

Kathryn Hansen

Kathryn Hansen is a cultural historian with a special interest in Indian theatre. Her most recent book, Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies, presents the narratives of a quartet of artists in the Parsi theatre. It is centrally concerned with ...

Kavita Bhanot

Kavita Bhanot grew up in London and lived in Birmingham before moving to Delhi to direct an Indian-British literary festival and then to work as an editor for India’s first literary agency. She spent two years running a guest house ...

Ketaki Kushari Dyson

Ketaki Kushari Dyson was born in Calcutta in 1940 and educated at Calcutta and Oxford. The first Indian woman to gain a First in English Literature at Oxford, she also has a doctorate from there. Based in Britain since her ...

Kishwar Desai

Kishwar Desai has worked in print and TV for over 20 years. Her first book Darlingji:The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt was published by HarperCollins India in 2007. Her first novel, Witness the Night, was published in ...

Lakshmi Holmström

Lakshmi Holmström is a writer and translator who was born in India, studied at Madras and Oxford universities, and now lives in England. She is the author of Indian Fiction in English: the Novels of R. K. Narayan (Calcutta: Writers’ Workshop,

Malik Sajad

Malik was born, and grew up, in Srinagar, Kashmir. He was interested in drawing from early childhood and was taught by his father. In 2003, at the age of 14, he joined Greater Kashmir, the region's largest circulated English daily ...

Meaghan Delahunt

Meaghan is the author of The Red Book (2008) and In the Blue House (2002) which was nominated for the Orange Prize, won the Saltire First Book Prize, a Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year prize and a regional ...

Michael Horovitz

Michael Horovitz is an English poet, artist and translator. He was the youngest of ten children who were brought to England from Nazi Germany by their parents. Michael has spent most of his adult life as a poet, songwriter-singer, jazz,

Mick Brown

Born in 1950, Mick Brown is a freelance writer and broadcaster who has written on music and other cultural affairs for a wide variety of publications including the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Observer, the Sunday Correspondent, Rolling Stone and ...

Mirza Waheed

Mirza Waheed was born and brought up in Srinagar, Kashmir. At 18 he moved to Delhi to study English Literature at the University of Delhi, and thereafter worked as a journalist and editor in the city for four years. In ...

Mohammed Hanif

Mohammed Hanif was born in Okara, Pakistan in 1965. He uated from Pakistan Air Force Academy as Pilot Officer, but subsequently left to pursue a career in journalism. He has written plays for the stage and BBC radio and his ...

Moni Mohsin

Moni Mohsin (born 1963) is a Pakistani writer, who grew up in Lahore. A graduate of Cambridge University, where she studied anthropology, Mohsin founded Pakistan’s first environmental magazine. After General Zia’s assassination she moved more decisively into the public sphere,

Naman P. Ahuja

Naman P. Ahuja is Associate Professor of Ancient Indian Art and Architecture at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where his research and graduate teaching focus on Indian iconography, sculpture, temple architecture and Sultanate period painting. He has recently completed a ...

Nikesh Shukla

Nikesh Shukla is a London-based author, film maker and poet. He is the resident poet for BBC Asian Network. His writing has been featured on BBC2, Radio1 and 4, Resonance fm and BBC Asian Network. He has been published in ...

Nitasha Kaul

Dr. Nitasha Kaul is a perpetually homeless Kashmiri writer, poet, traveler, photographer, and academic who inhabits many lives in UK, Bhutan, India. She has a joint PhD in Economics and Philosophy and is the author of Imagining Economics Otherwise: encounters with ...

Niven Govinden

Niven is an English novelist. He was born in East Sussex and then studied film at Goldsmiths College. We Are The New Romantics was published by Bloomsbury in 2004. Graffiti My Soul was published by Canongate Books in January 2007.

Padmini Ray Murray

Dr Padmini Ray Murray lectures in publishing studies at the University of Stirling. She has published articles on Byron and gender, embodiment, and book history. Her research interests include the colonial history of the book, the impact of digital technologies ...

Paul Burston

Paul Burston was born in York, raised in South Wales and now lives in London. He studied English, Drama and Film Studies at university, before leaving the comforts of academia for the cut and thrust of gay activism. He worked for ...

Paul Gravett

Paul Gravett is a London-based journalist, curator, writer and broadcaster who has worked in comics publishing and promotion for over twenty years. In 1983, Gravett launched Escape Magazine with Peter Stanbury in an attempt to showcase the cream of the ...

Pawas Bisht

Pawas Bisht is a PhD student at the Culture and Media Analysis Research Group (Department of Social Sciences) at Loughborough University. His work examines the memorialisation of the Bhopal gas disaster. Prior to undertaking his PhD studies, Pawas taught film production ...

Rana Dasgupta

Rana Dasgupta (born 5 November 1971 in Canterbury, England) is a British-Indian novelist and essayist. He grew up in Cambridge, England and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He lives ...

Rani Singh

Rani Singh has worked on South Asia for the whole of her career, which has mostly been with the BBC. After founding her own children’s theatre company she worked in children’s television, writing and presenting programs like Rainbow, Playschool and ...

Ravi Vasudevan

Ravi Vasudevan works at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, and is a co-initiator of Sarai, the Centre’s urban and media studies programme. He is a member of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader series, editorial ...

Razia Iqbal

Razia Iqbal is a Special Correspondent for BBC News, reporting on a variety of foreign and domestic stories for the 6 and 10 o'clock news. She also presents her own books programme on the News Channel, called Talking Books. From ...

Rebecca Swift

Rebecca Swift, born in 1964, read English at Oxford University and has since worked as an editor and writer and Director of The Literary Consultancy (TLC). For seven years she worked at Virago Press, where she first conceived of the ...

Robert Blyth

Dr Robert Blyth is Curator of Imperial & Maritime History at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. He studied history at the University of Aberdeen, gaining a PhD in 1998. He has taught African, British and imperial history at Queen’s ...

Roger Elsgood

Roger Elsgood is the Creative Director of Art and Adventure Ltd, a production company specialising in working with south Asian artists, ideas and texts. Roger is an independent producer working with BBC Radio 3 and 4 and the World Service.

Rohini Chowdhury

Rohini Chowdhury writes for both children and adults and has more than twenty books and several short stories to her credit. Her published writing is in both Hindi and English, and covers a wide spectrum of literary genres including translations,

Romesh Gunesekera

Born in Sri Lanka, Romesh has lived in Britain since the early 1970s. His first novel Reef was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. He is also the author of The Sandglass, (winner of the inaugural BBC Asia Award) and ...

Rosie Thomas

Rosie is a pioneer of the academic study of popular Indian cinema, establishing an international reputation following the publication of her first groundbreaking article on Hindi cinema in Screen in 1985. Since then she has written widely on Indian cinema,

Rowyda Amin

Rowyda Amin was born in Newfoundland, Canada to parents of Saudi Arabian and Irish origin. She has lived in Riyadh and is now based in London. In 2009, she was awarded the Wasafiri New Writing Prize for poetry. Rowyda has ...

Ruby Sahota

Ruby trained at Drama Studio London. She made her professional theatre debut playing Basanti and Uma in Bollywood, Yet Another Love Story (RIFCO/Riverside Studios). Her recent theatre work has included: Mistaken...Annie Besant in India (Vayu Naidu/Yvonne Arnaud), The Hot Zone ...

Sandeep Parmar

Sandeep was born in Nottingham in 1979 and raised in Southern California. She received her PhD in English Literature from University College London in 2008. The subject of her research was the unpublished autobiographies of the modernist poet Mina Loy. Sandeep ...

Saradha Soobrayen

Saradha Soobrayen is a freelance poetry editor and the reviews editor for Modern Poetry in Translation.She works as a mentor and coach providing professional development for emerging and established writers and artists. Her poetry appears in the Red Anthology 2009,

Sarfraz Manzoor

Sarfraz Manzoor is a journalist, author and broadcaster. He is a contracted writer for The Guardian and The Observer but his writing has also appeared in, amongst others, Esquire, Prospect, The New Statesman, Index on Censorship and the Daily Mail. His ...

Sarnath Banerjee

Sarnath Banerjee is an Indian graphic novelist, artist, and film maker. After getting a degree in biochemistry, he received an MA in Image and Communication from Goldsmiths College, University of London. His first novel, Corridor (2004), published by Penguin Books, India,

Sascha A Akhtar

Sascha was born and educated in Pakistan and the U.S. She earned a B.A in Liberal Arts from Bennington College where she studied writing, photography, filmmaking and multi-media installation art. In 2003, she was awarded a fellowship to attend the ...

Sathnam Sanghera

Sathnam Sanghera was born to Punjabi parents in the West Midlands in 1976, attended Wolverhampton Grammar School and graduated from Christ’s College, Cambridge with a first class degree in English Language and Literature in 1998. His first book, The Boy ...

Seema Anand

Seema Anand is a passionate and inspiring storyteller. Whether her listeners are 9 or 90, she has the capacity to transport them into her story-world and hold them there. Seema is unusual in that she has no genre in her ...

Shabibi Shah

Shabibi has a degree in journalism from Kabul University, was married to a political journalist and worked for 12 years as a teacher in Afghanistan. She fled from Afghanistan with her husband and three children to escape the then Communist ...

Shama Rahman

Shama Rahman is a musician, story teller, poet, actress and as a scientist has a firm basis in science and its wonderment. Born in United Arab Emirates to a Bengali medical doctor and classical singer and having lived on three ...

Smita Singh

Smita is the Chairperson and Treasurer of Vaani, a platform she initiated for Asian women writers to meet, and exchange and share ideas. She has a First Class Masters degree in English Literature and a variety of experiences of working ...

Sonia Faleiro

Sonia is an award-winning reporter and writer, and winner of the prestigious CNN Young Writer of the Year Award. She writes regularly for a variety of Indian publications including Vogue, Marie Claire, India Today, Indian Express, Tehelka and Outlook. She ...

Soumik Datta

Soumik Datta is a torch-bearer of the fretless sarod. Born in Kolkata, he moved to London at the age of 11. Upon discovering his grandmother’s sarod he began his instruction with the legendary Pandit Buddhadev Das Gupta in Kolkata. He ...

Suhel Seth

Suhel Seth – well-known for his forthright views on television shows, and as a debator – has performed in over 135 English plays and six films, and also has two books to his credit: one, entitled In Your Face, is ...

Sunand Prasad

Sunand Prasad is senior partner of London based architectural practice Penoyre & Prasad LLP, whose work has been widely published and won many awards. He was President of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) from 2007 to 2009, promoting ...

Sunita Pattani

Sunita Pattani is an emotional-eating expert and upcoming author of My Secret Affair with Chocolate Cake. She shows people how to lose weight without dieting, and how to heal their relationship with food. Having healed herself of constant overeating and ...

Surina Narula

Surina has been spearheading the philanthropic activities of the DSC group through her contribution to numerous socially relevant and charitable causes. Surina is intimately engaged with community development and plays a key role in the Consortium for Street Children (47 member-NGOs ...

Talvin Singh

Talvin Singh (born 1970 London) is an accomplished tabla player, electronic musician, music theorist, record producer, visual practitioner and DJ. He is best known as the father of modern Asian electronica music. Drawing inspiration from the Indian classical arts, Singh first ...

Tim Edwards

Tim Edwards is a research and information specialist for the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal - a coalition of survivor organisations and international NGO’s - and a trustee of the Bhopal Medical Appeal, a UK-based charity supporting medical rehabilitation ...

Valerie Henitiuk

Valerie Henitiuk is an award-winning scholar researching aspects of the intersection of translation studies, world literature, Japanese literature and women's writing. She is a Canadian citizen, currently on the faculty of the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Valerie has ...

Vayu Naidu

Vayu Naidu is an accomplished storyteller, writer, performer, workshop leader and teacher. Her art of storytelling is derived from the Indic oral tradition and its energy comes quite simply through the telling - not reading - of a story. The ...

Veronica Doubleday

In the years before the military-communist coup and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Veronica Doubleday accompanied her husband to Afghanistan and lived with him in the ancient city of Herat during the main period of his research into traditional Afghan ...

Virendra Sharma MP

Virendra Sharma was elected as MP in the Ealing Southall by-election held on 19 July 2007. The by-election was called following the death of the sitting Labour MP, Piara Khabra. Virendra Sharma’s arrival in Parliament was the end of one ...

William Alden

William Alden is Clerk (Chief Executive) of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, the City of London Livery Company for the Communications and Content industries. William comes from the industry, having run the Alden Press in Oxford for 25 ...