The White Owl Literature Festival & Book Fair (Feb 9-10, 2024)

Vikas Kumar is Associate Professor of Economics at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. He is the author of Numbers as Political Allies: The Census in Jammu and Kashmir (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Waiting for a Christmas Gift: Essays on Politics, Elections and Media in Nagaland (Heritage Publishing House, 2023) and the co-author of Numbers in India's Periphery: The Political Economy of Government Statistics (Cambridge University Press, 2020). He curated the exhibitions Counting and Controlling Population: Postal Services, Census & Family Planning in Post-colonial India, 1951 – 2011 (Bangalore International Centre, January 2023) and Baba Saheb: An Extraordinary Philatelic Journey (1966−2022) (India International Centre, New Delhi, June 2022).

Dr. Joy LK Pachuau is Professor of History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She has a doctorate in history from the same University, as well as a doctorate in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford, UK. At JNU she teaches courses related to the history of Christianity in Asia in the 16th-17th centuries and gender and society in medieval India. Her research interest thus includes the history of Portuguese expansion in Asia especially in relation to religion but also other socio-cultural aspects. More recently she has been working on the history of Northeast India with a focus in the history of identity formations. She is also interested in the visual history of the region. Dr. Pachuau’s recent publications include Being Mizo: Identity and Belonging in Northeast India, (OUP, 2014), The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India (with Willem van Schendel, CUP, 2015) and Christianity in Indian History: Issues of Culture, Power and Knowledge (eds with P. Malekandathil and Tanika Sarkar, Primus 2016) and Landscape, Culture and Belonging: Writing the History of Northeast India, New Delhi (edited with Neeladri Bhattacharya: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Entangled Lives: Human-Animal-Plant Histories of the Eastern Himalyan Triangle, co-written with Willem van Schendel was published in 2022 from Cambridge Unviersity Press.

On most days, Vaishali finds it hard to make a conversation. She gives her stories a home in her head and when there’s no space for more stories, her head explodes! Her stories burst out and flow in ink over paper. An award-winning author and scriptwriter based in Mumbai, Vaishali loves writing about unexplored places, untold histories, unsung people, and unheard nonhumans. She loves talking to children over adults and wants to be an amaltas tree in her next life.

An award-winning author and scriptwriter based in Mumbai, Vaishali Shroff loves writing about unexplored places, untold histories, unsung people, and unheard nonhumans. Her popular works include Taatung Tatung and Other Amazing Stories of India’s Diverse Languages (Penguin, 2023), Meera Mukherjee: Breaking Moulds (Art1st, 2023), Batata, Pao and All Things Portuguese (PPP, 2022), Sita’s Chitwan (Penguin, 2021), The Adventures of Padma and a Blue Dinosaur (Harper, 2018), Raindrops and Ari (Tulika, 2013, 2014) among many others.
Winner of the AutHer Award 2023, The White Raven 2023, Scholarships from SCBWI, USA (2020, 2023), Toka Box South Asian Honor Award, Best in Indian Children’s Writing Award (2018, 2019), Honourable Mention at the BK Awards 2023, among other recognitions, Shroff has been invited as a speaker to literature festivals across the country, including The British Society for the History of Science (BSHS). She loves speaking to children over adults and wants to be an amaltas tree in her next life.

Nona Uppal is an author and marketer based in New Delhi, India. Penguin will publish her debut romance novel in February 2024. Over the last two years, she has built an online presence of over 30,000 followers across platforms by sharing her short fiction pieces on love, loss, friendships, and relationships. Her daily nine-to-five covers brand-building and marketing for an upcoming D2C brand and as a freelance journalist, her work has been published in The Washington Post, Mint Lounge, Vogue India, and The Quint. An alumna of Lady Shri Ram College for Women and Ashoka University, Nona discovered writing as her passion by accident and now finds joy in sharing it with whoever is willing to read or listen.

Roluahpuia is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT. He obtained his PhD from TISS, Guwahati. He has held teaching and fellow positions at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, and IIT Guwahati. He was awarded the Arvind Raghunathan and Sribala Subramanian South Asia Visiting Fellowship, 2018-19, at the South Asia Institute, Harvard University, United States. His published work has appeared in noted journals, including Asian Ethnicity, Contemporary South Asia, Economic and Political Weekly, Himal South Asian, Journal of Borderlands Studies, Nations and Nationalism. His book titled Nationalism in the Vernacular: States, Tribes, and the Politics of Peace in Northeast India (2023) was published by Cambridge University Press. Dr. Puia’s research interest broadly covers, among others, identity, nationalism, development, and borderland studies.

Arupjyoti Saikia is Professor of History at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. He held the Agrarian Studies Programme Fellowship at Yale University, and visiting fellow positions at Cambridge University and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
Saikia is the author of Forests and Ecological History of Assam, 1826-2000 (OUP, 2011), A Century of Protests: Peasant Politics in Assam since 1900 (Routledge, 2014), The Unquiet River: A Biography of the Brahmaputra (OUP, 2019), and The Quest for Modern Assam: A History, 1942-2000 (Penguin Random House, 2023). His A Century of Protests won the Srikant Dutt book prize awarded by the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (now PMML), New Delhi, in 2015. The Unquiet River was shortlisted for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay New India Foundation Book Prize in 2020, long-listed for the Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize in 2020 and got an ‘Honourable Mention’ for the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize in 2021 given by the Association for Asian Studies. Currently, he is authoring a monograph in Assamese that delves into the lives of 19th-century peasants in Assam.

Vasudha Rai is a bestselling author, columnist, podcaster and an award-winning journalist who has written on beauty and wellness for more than two decades. Her first book Glow: Indian Foods, Recipes & Rituals for Beauty, Inside & Out, has revived the usage of traditional ingredients in everyday living. Her second book, Ritual: Daily Practices for Wellness, Beauty & Bliss, modernizes traditional practices, so they’re relevant for contemporary lifestyles. A yoga teacher with a 300-hr certification, Vasudha has taught yoga at The Yoga Studio in Delhi.

Her beauty column appears in HT Mint Lounge and two seasons of her podcast ‘Holistic Healing with Vasudha Rai’—in association with RedFM, India’s leading radio channel—are streaming across all major platforms including Spotify, Jio Saavn, Google Podcasts and Apple Podcasts. Her work has appeared in publications such as Vogue, Conde Nast Traveller and The Hindu Weekend. She’s also been the beauty director for Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Women’s Health, India.

In 2019 Vasudha was awarded the Beauty & Wellness Voice of The Year at the Cosmopolitan Blogger Awards. In 2022, she was awarded the Voice of Reason in beauty writing as part of the Vogue Beauty Festival, and the Future Forward Influencer in the Wellness category by Peaklife Magazine.

Vasudha has released her third book in Jan 2024, an Audible Original titled The Book of Holistic Beauty – streaming on Audible now.

Ankush Saikia was born in Tezpur, Assam in 1975 and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin; Assam; and Shillong, Meghalaya. He has worked in journalism and publishing in New Delhi, and is currently based in Shillong in North-East India. Saikia is the author of eight previous books including The Forest Beneath the Mountains, The Girl From Nongrim Hills, and the Detective Arjun Arora series (Tears of the Dragon is the fourth book in the Arjun Arora series.) He was shortlisted for the Outlook/Picador-India non-fiction writing competition in 2005, and was one of the recipients of the Shanghai Writers’ Association’s 2018 fellowships. His articles and longform stories (mostly on North-East India) have appeared in FountainInk magazine, Scroll.in, The Indian Express, The Hindu, and Hindustan Times, among others.

Anurag Basnet: Anurag Basnet is an editor and translator based in Gangtok, Sikkim. He has been associated with the publishing industry for fifteen years with stints at Penguin Books India (now Penguin Random House India), Rupa Publications and Speaking Tiger. His published works include translations of a travelogue by Anil Yadav, Is That Even a Country, Sir!, and a book of essays by Ravish Kumar, The Free Voice: On Democracy, Culture and the Nation.

Canato Jimo is a picture-book maker from Nagaland. He currently works as an art director at Pratham Books. He loves to guzzle tea and is a recovering stationery addict.

Shelmi Sankhil
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature & Translation Studies, School of Letters, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi.

Interest areas: Naga writing in English (fiction), Northeast Indian writing in english, myth and fantasy, hermeneutics, interface between literature and philosophy, literature and history, etc., and comparative worldview.

Publication: Flame on a Hill: A Collection of Stories (2021), and several articles and book reviews.

Current responsibilities at the University: I run the masters programme in Comparative Literature at AUD. I also teach two MA courses that were designed by me. These are "Reading Myth and Fantasy", and "Hermeneutics: Key Theorists". Besides these weekly teachings and admin related work of the programme, I am currently supervising 09 MA students of Comparative Literature working on their individual dissertation.

Durjoy Datta is the author of nineteen bestselling romance novels. Born in New Delhi, he completed a degree in engineering and business management before embarking on a writing career. His first book, Of Course I Love You . . ., was published when he was twenty-one years old and was an instant bestseller. His successive novels—Till the Last Breath, Hold My Hand, When Only Love Remains, World’s Worst Best Boyfriend, The Girl of My Dreams, The Boy Who Loved, The Boy with a Broken Heart and The Perfect Us—have also found prominence on various bestseller lists, making him one of the highest-selling authors in India. Durjoy also has to his credit eleven television shows, for which he has written over 1000 episodes. For more updates, you can follow him on Instagram (www.instagram.com/durjoydatta).

Deepthi Talwar is Executive Editor at Penguin Random House India. She has been a part of the publishing industry for two decades and has worked with and published fiction and non-fiction writers across genres. Twitter: @DeepthiTalwar Instagram: @deepthitalwar

Easterine Kire is a Naga writer. She wrote the first Naga novel in English, 'A Naga Village Remembered' (2003), reissued by Speaking Tiger as 'Sky is my Father’. Her novel, ‘When the River Sleeps' won the Hindu Lit for Life 2015, and her novella, 'Son of the Thundercloud' won the Tata Litlive Book of the Year (2017) and the Bal Puraskar Sahitya in 2018. In 2023, her novel, 'Spirit Nights' won the FICCI award.
Kire also writes poetry and non-fiction. She has written a number of children's books both in Norwegian and English.

Theyiesinuo Keditsu (PhD) is an indigenous feminist, poet, academic, educator. She advocates for the revival of Indigenous Naga textiles and women's narratives through her popular Instagram avatar @mekhalamama. Over the past six years, she has revolutionized the way Naga textiles are perceived through her unique storytelling approach bringing out the cultural and personal narratives associated with mekhalas and other cloths. She is widely credited with influencing women in Nagaland, the North-East and beyond to wear mekhalas as fashionable garments that can be used as special and daily work wear.Her advocacy has inspired other initiatives promoting the wearing, research, design and sales of textiles, renewing interest in a neglected tradition. She campaigns for sustainable fashion practices and is known forpromoting locally produced indigenous textiles & crafts as well as local businesses with a focus on those run by women entrepreneurs.
The impact of her textile and fashion activism has been recognised and featured in Roots & Leisure, Verve, Voice of Fashion, Indian Express, The Sunday Standard Magazine, Huffington Post, Times of India, National News UAE and most recently, Vogue India.
She writes creatively under the pen name T. Keditsuand has published two books of poetry, Sopfünuo and Wakeas well as Ukepenuopfü, an illustrated children’s storybook. She has contributed to a number of anthologies, journals and books in her creative & academic capacities, such as Yaari: An Anthology on Friendship by Women and Queer Folx, YodaPress (2023), The Many That I Am: Writings from Nagaland, Zubaan (2019), the Journal of Big History, South Asia Review, FemAsia and The Yugen Quest Review and The Little Journal to name a few.
Two of her poems ‘Shame’& ‘Survival’ have been made into poetry films by TakeOne Films. Her poems have been translated into Marathi, Hindi and most notedly into Gujarati by emininet poet, SitanshuYashaschandra.
She is widely sought after as a public speakerand educator within her Naga community and in North East India.
With a PhD in Cultural Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, she has over 16 years of teaching experience and is currently an assistant professor in Kohima College, Kohima, Nagaland.

L. Somi Roy is the author of And That Is Why: Manipuri Myths Retold (2021), the precursor to Feathers, Fools, and Farts: Manipuri Folktales Retold. A cultural conservationist, curator, and translator, he has curated film for museums in New York like the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Asia Society. His translations of his mother, the Manipuri writer Binodini, include the Penguin Modern Classic novel The Princess and the Political Agent (2020). He is the founder trustee of Imasi: The Maharaj Kumari Binodini Devi Foundation in Imphal.

Mamang Dai is a poet and novelist from Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh. A former journalist and President of the Arunachal Pradesh Union of Working Journalists, Dai also worked with World Wide Fund for nature in the Eastern Himalaya Biodiversity Hotspots programme.
In 2003 she received the state Verrier Elwin Award for her book Arunachal Pradesh- the hidden land featuring the culture, folklore and customs of Arunachal’s different communities.
A Padma Shri awardee, Dai is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award 2017, for her novel The Black Hill, in English.
Her latest publication is The White Shirts of Summer (Poetry) Speaking Tiger Books October 2023.
Dai lives in Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh, India.

Mansi Shetty is a marketeer at Penguin. Last associated with One by One, she helped build the brand perception and digital communication strategy for Kitab Khana, Indian Novels Collective, Niyogi Books among other publishing houses, bookstores and corporates. Besides spending her time building bookish communities, Mansi is a voracious reader and blogger.

Meghaa Gupta has worked in Indian children’s publishing for over a decade and writes on history and the environment for young and lay readers. Her picture book A Home of Our Own (Tulika, 2018) is part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Book Club and she is also the author of a critically-acclaimed series of history books on Independent India published by the children’s imprint of Penguin Random House - Unearthed: An Environmental History of Independent India (2020) and After Midnight: A History of Independent India (2022). Meghaa holds a Masters in Environmental Humanities from the UK and leads the Young People's programme at the Green Literature Festival.

Milee Ashwarya is the Publisher of the Adult Publishing Group at Penguin Random House India. In her role she leads the frontlist and backlist publishing programmes for the group under imprints like Allen Lane, Vintage, Hamish Hamilton, Viking, Ebury Press, Penguin Business, Penguin Ananda, Penguin Classics, Penguin Veer among others. She has been responsible for establishing and spearheading the publishing vision and strategy at Penguin Random House India for over a decade, discovering new trends and exploring new genres. An award-winning publisher, her focus has been on championing diverse voices, discovering talented debut writers, and building on the inclusive programme at Penguin Random House India.
A TEDx speaker, she is passionate about issues related to working women. She was awarded the Women Achievers’ Samman 2017 for publishing by the Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO), the Distinguished Alumni Award 2018 for Excellence in Publishing by Hindu College, Delhi University, the Exceptional Woman of Excellence Award by the Women Economic Forum in 2019 and was selected as a delegate for Australia India Youth Dialogue the pre-eminent track-two young leader's dialogue between Australia and India for 2020.

Nandini Nayar is India’s most prolific children’s writer. She has authored over seventy books for children of all ages. What Shall I Make? was named an outstanding book by the USSBBY. Sometimes Mama, Sometimes Papa and her early chapter book, Mini’s Questions, are on the Parag Honour List. In addition, Nandini has been a regular contributor to iconic children’s magazines like Tinkle, Hoot, Toot, Dimdima and The Children’s Magazine and newspapers like The Hindu and Sakal Times.

Nikhil Gulati is an author and illustrator of graphic novels. He believes in telling stories that inspire wonder and foster compassion.

Ratna Vira is a leading Indian best-selling author who is also an accomplished artist. After a successful career where she worked at the CXO level in multinational and leading Indian corporates, Ratna turned to writing, with her novels and non-fiction books highlighting issues of deep social concern. The inspiration for her art comes from life around her, influences of social media, and the extension of her imagination. For Ratna, the ability to write and paint is seamless, and they both exist in tandem with each other.
Her first book, Daughter By Court Order, was a national bestseller that was featured in The New York Times, and she received a personal message from the Prime Minister who applauded the issues she raised in her book. The plot holds up a mirror to society and challenges the patriarchal structure, which still exists in many parts of India. Her second book, It’s Not About You, was in Buzzfeed’s list of 35 Top Fiction and Non-Fiction Books of 2016. Her third book, Why People Give, which she wrote with her daughter Suhasini, was pathbreaking and the royalty supports a medical charity in India.
Ratna’s art is a permanent exhibit at Artistique, the gallery at the Oberoi, and her works are displayed in four continents. She lives in Gurgaon, where she is at work on two novels and a new exhibition.
Ratna holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics andPolitical Science, and a Masters in English literature from St Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. She also holds an MBA.
Over the years, Ratna has spoken at several leading universities, institutes,and corporate groups across the world. These include the University of Oxford (Two Cultures Seminar at Somerville College), the University of Cambridge, the Said Business School, Nanyang University Singapore, the Indian Institute of Management, Symbiosis, King’s School Canterbury, the Annual Conference of UK Women Judges, many of the top Indian schools, and corporates including Nestle, FICCI-FLO and others. She has spoken at TEDx at one of the leading Indian schools.

Jahnavi Barua is an Indian writer based in Bangalore. Next Door (Penguin India, 2008), her debut collection of short stories was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her next, a novel called Rebirth (Penguin India, 2010), was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. The third, Undertow, a novel, was published by Penguin Random House India (Viking Books) in February 2020 and was longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature 2020. Her short fiction has been widely anthologized and her work is part of several university syllabi. Jahnavi studied medicine but is not a practising doctor. She was born in Guwahati and raised between Assam, Meghalaya, Delhi and Manchester.

Jane De Suza is known for her quirky books: the SuperZero series, Uncool, Happily Never After and The Spy Who Lost Her Head, among others. She writes a humour column for The Hindu, had a parenting column for Good Housekeeping and is now co-building an app. Jane is a management graduate and a creative director. She currently lives in Singapore with her family. While travelling across various literature fests, schools and workshops, she grew fascinated by the creative potential of children, from which comes this book.

Sarnath Banerjee has written five graphic novels (published by Penguin and Harper Collins) and finishing his sixth, which is supported by a stipendium from the Berlin Senate. He has shown his work at several Biennales (Saopaolo, Setouchi, Sharjah, Kochi, etc) and Art Fairs (Frieze, Arco, etc) and has had several international solos and group shows in museums and centers of contemporary art. He has also had public commissions, notably a series of billboards across London during the London Olympics titled the Gallery of Losers. Banerjee has been a CAST fellow at MIT, a Belknap fellow at Princeton, a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, the Indian Foundation for the Arts, and the MacArthur Foundation (Asia). He has written columns for national newspapers and founded an independent publishing house called Phantomville. He has studied at the University of Delhi and Goldsmiths College, London.Currently, he is commissioned by the Berlin Bienalle, 2025, to produce and stage twelve theatrical comics for the exhibition.

Mmhonlümo Kikon was born in Kohima and studied literature at the University of Delhi. He is the author of three book of poems, namely, The Penmi Poems, 2018, The Village Empire, 2019, and Slingstones, 2021.
Mmhonlümo was a legislator in the Nagaland Legislative Assembly for two terms from 2013-2023.

Srinath Perur writes about science, travel and books among other things and translates from Kannada to English. He is the author of the travelogue If It's Monday It Must Be Madurai and the translator of This Life at Play and Ghachar Ghochar.

Subhash Chandra Garg was a member of the Indian Administrative Service for more than thirty-six years. He served as secretary, economic affairs,
finance secretary and power secretary in the Government of India, and finance secretary of the state of Rajasthan. Presently, he works as a freelance policy strategist on economy, finance and fiscal affairs. He has been writing blogs regularly for more than two years, which can be read at subhashchandragarg.blogspot.com. He also writes regularly for newspapers and magazines, and appears on television channels for discussions on the Budget and other public policy matters.

Swargajyoti Gohain is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University, Haryana. She has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Emory University, U.S.A., and a Bachelors and Masters in Sociology from Delhi University. She held postdoctoral positions in the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, Netherlands, and the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. Before joining Ashoka University, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kanpur.
Her monograph, Imagined Geographies in the Indo-Tibetan Borderlands (2020) was based on ethnographic research in the Buddhist districts of west Arunachal Pradesh. Her current book project focuses on negotiations between Buddhist educational institutions and the Indian state in the context of borders and geopolitics. Her other long-term interest is in studying Himalayan wildlife.

Dr. Veio Pou is Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Delhi. His debut novel, Waiting for the Dust to Settle (2020) won the Gordon Graham Prize for Naga Literature (Fiction) in 2021. He is the author of Literary Cultures of India’s Northeast: Naga Writings in English (2015) and Keeper of Stories: Critical Readings of Easterine Kire's Novels (2023). His research interests include studies on the Northeast of India, oral/written interface, biblical narratives and cultural studies. Besides his academic engagements, he also likes to discuss issues on society, life, and faith at the popular level.

Jim Wungramyao Kasom is a storyteller, photographer, and author of Homecoming & Other Stories and Cradling Memories of My Land. Born and raised in a village in Ukhrul, Manipur, Jim has lived away in the cities for most of his life and dreams of reuniting with his homeland. Writing about home is a self-indulging therapy to cope with the space and time lived away from home

Dr. Moushumi Kandali’s latest book ‘The Black Magic Women’, published by Penguin Random House in 2022 is a remarkable contribution in the discourse of ‘Northeast Literature’, for which she was awarded the prestigious South Asia Ladli Media Award in the category of Literature( Fiction ) for the year 2023. She had also received many such awards such as Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad Award, Munin Borkotoki Award and others for her creative writings which had been anthologized into five collections of short stories so far in the last two decades.
As a bilingual (English and Assamese) author, art historian-critic, and translator, she has published eleven books by now. Her stories have appeared in the 'Oxford anthology of North-East Writing,' the Penguin’s anthology of ‘Fifteen classic Assamese short stories,' and the 'Greatest Assamese Stories Ever Told' by Aleph Book Company which was amongst chosen as one of the select 25 powerful short stories within the span of 100 years of Assamese literature.
As an Art historian she has curated a museum of modern art at the Tezpur University named after the esteemed modernist artist of North East late Neelpawan Baruah, paving way for innovative pedagogy. Her areas of expertise as an academician include Visual culture and Arts, Aesthetics, Literary cultures of India, as well as an avid interest in Gender Studies. Currently she teaches at the department of Cultural Studies, Tezpur University , after her several years of teaching as permanent faculty at the Ambedkar University of Delhi.

Vivek Shanbhag is a Kannada author, editor and playwright. He founded the pioneering literary journal Desha Kaala, editing it for seven years. His works include the widely translated Ghachar Ghochar. Although his stories are regularly translated and anthologised, Sakina’s Kiss is only his second complete work to be translated into the English. He is a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the Ashoka University. He is an engineer by training and lives in Bangalore.

Viju B. is Deputy Resident Editor of the Times of India, Kochi. He reports chiefly on issues at the intersection of development, ecology and culture. While working in Mumbai for various national newspapers, he covered the catastrophic 26/7 Mumbai floods, the 26/11 terror attacks and the Gujarat riots. He exposed the Sindhudurg mining scam in the Western Ghats and was part of the core investigative team that exposed the Adarsh Building scam in Mumbai that eventually led to the resignation of Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan. In 2018, he extensively covered the Kerala floods, travelling to the worst-hit areas in the state.

Yogesh Maitreya is a writer, poet, translator and publisher. He is the founder and editor of Panther's Paw Publication that is dedicated to publishing literature by Dalit-Bahujan writers (in English and as translations from other Indian languages). He is the author of Flowers on the Grave of Caste (2019), a collection of short stories, Singing/Thinking Anti Caste (2021), a book of essays on music and memories, and Ambedkar 2021 (2021), a book of prose poetry.

Arsh Verma is a 2017-batch Haryana cadre IPS officer. He is an alumnus of St John’s High School, Chandigarh, and Hindu College, University of Delhi. Besides writing, he enjoys drawing comics and playing golf.

Lekhnath Chhetri is a journalist from Darjeeling, as well as a poet and social activist. His interests lie in fiction, history and the archiving and documenting of violence, both by and against the state. Phoolange was shortlisted for the Madan Puraskar, Nepal's topmost literary award. He is also a translator, and his last published work was the Nepali translation of The Free Voice by Ravish Kumar.

Avinuo Kire is a writer and teacher from Kohima, Nagaland. She has authored The Power to Forgive and Other Stories (2015), The Last Light of Glory Days and Other Stories (2021), a collection of poetry, Where Wildflowers Grow (2015), and co-authored an anthology of oral narratives titled Naga Heritage Centre-People Stories: Volume One (2016). Avinuo currently teaches English at Kohima College.

Dimple Jangda has donned many hats before finding her calling in studies of gut health and Ayurveda. Her research in Ayurvedic science and food chemistry was based on her quest for good health.
She started Prana Healthcare centre in 2017 with a team of Ayurvedic doctors, therapists and biotech researchers. Prana was featured as a case study by Routledge, Taylor & Francis publication, UK, in their book Doing Business in South Asia.
Dimple has received several honours, including Asia Iconic awards, Business World—Future Masters and Times Brand Icon 2021. She was recognized as ‘40 most influential under 40’ by the Indian Achievers Club. Dimple also has also received honorary doctorates from The Thames International University in Paris and the National American University.
Her clinic and academy have helped patients and students from over sixty-four countries to recover from chronic diseases using Ayurveda and nutrition. She gives healthcare advice across various social media platforms, where half a million followers from over 100 countries have been tuning in every day.

Nandita Basu is a comic-book artist and a musician. She loves to daydream, eat gummy bears, play music and draw. She likes to have conversations with animals and children (in that order) more than adults. She has had many great adventures in life, which she doesn’t like to disclose because some things should just remain that way. Her books for children and young adults include The Piano, Rain Must Fall and Starry, Starry Night. Her graphic novel for adults has been published by Simon & Schuster in 2023.

A. K. Bhattacharya - AKB to every journalist - set the bar for business reporting as the chief of bureau at the Economic Times in the early 1990s, when economic reforms raged. He had a ringside view to many other disruptions, creative and otherwise, during his four decades in journalism, a journey that started when he switched careers after a year of teaching. AKB then went on to become the editor of the Pioneer and Business Standard. He is now Business Standard's editorial director and a writer of two long-running columns.

Renthunglo Shitiri is an acclaimed educator, accomplished author of 2 poetry books and a number of picture books, an active member of The Nagaland Chamber Choir, and an avid reader as well. Amidst her busy schedule as a mother of four and a post-graduate teacher at Delhi Public School Dimapur, she takes time out for her passion- writing.

Kanchana Banerjee is one of India’s best crime fiction writers. Her most popular works include ‘Until I Found You’, ‘A Forgotten Affair’, and ‘Nobody’s Child’. She describes her calling to writing as a voice in her head that was propelling her towards her destination. With her Master’s Degree in English Literature from Jadavpur University, she started her writing career with The Statesman, Kolkata in 1993. She went on to work for The Times of India, Hyderabad and later went on the freelance route, before finally settling as a full time author. While thrillers, crime, and mystery are her preferred genres, her main interest is in exploring relationships, human behaviour, and telling a good story. According to Kanchana, if writing is her first love, talking about writing is as a close second. In 2011 she founded an online company called Writeword and conducted successful online writing courses to help women learn the art of freelance writing. Additionally, she has also conducted numerous writing workshops.