LitFest2024-New

Author bio

Author bio

Brook Eddy is the founder and CEO of Bhakti, Inc., best known for award-winning chai, innovative iced tea beverages that won first place in the North American Tea Championship, and being one of the first Certified B Corporations in America. As CEO, Brook was responsible for implementing all business strategies for building a national brand and launched over 18 SKU’s. 
Brook’s first book, STEEPED: Adventures Of A Tea Entrepreneur, which is part business memoir and part India travelogue, was a #1 New Release on Amazon and chosen by Colorado Public Radio as one of their “Favorite Books in 2023.” She is also a copywriter and has written for Yoga Journal and Mantra Magazine. She has a graduate degree from the University of Michigan and was a top three finalist for the “Entrepreneur of the Year Award” by Entrepreneur magazine. Brook also founded GITA Giving, a platform for supporting women and girls globally.
An entirely splendid, small-business saga, wearing a neo-hippie grin, shot through with intoxicating amounts of cardamom and all wrapped up in a dizzying, sexed-up love letter to Mother India. In turns inspiring, funny, and heartbreaking as it underscores the spurious excitement and stunning cruelty of trying to create an honest brand within the ruthless machinery of American capitalism. Brook’s powerful, woman-owned travelogue of love and motherhood, self-discovery and gut instinct, has all the ingredients to ensure you’ll never taste her company’s exquisite chai the same way again.
Mark Morford, Former Columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle and Author of The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism
I loved reading STEEPED! It's a beautifully written memoir and has what many of us aspire to: building a thriving business on passion and purpose. But the book is about more than sharing a success story, it brings you along with striking prose through India and on the highs, lows, joys, fears and failures. That journey is what lifts the words off the page and shows how difficult, yet rewarding taking risks can be.
Rosalind Wiseman, New York Times Bestselling Author of Queen Bees and Wannabes, the basis for the hit movie and Broadway musical, Mean Girls.

Author bio

Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri has been an Indian Foreign Service diplomat for twenty-eight years. She served in leadership positions at the United Nations for fifteen years, most recently as its Assistant Secretary General. She was a leader in the first global organization to promote gender equality—UNWOMEN, for seven foundational years. She is the recipient of the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights, among others.

Deepti Kapoor's Age of Vice, published last year, is a story of power, corruption, and complicity, set in modern India. In the early 2000s, the lives of Ajay, Neda, and Sunny – the novel's three main characters – cross in New Delhi. There is idealism, optimism even; but also crime, drugs, and violence, as Sunny Wadia follows in the footsteps of his powerful father. Age of Vice, which became a New York Times bestseller and will be adapted into a series, is not a didactic novel, but a deeply researched portrait of a changing country, with a fast-growing economy, and ever greater inequality. Deepti Kapoor is an Indian novelist currently based between India and Portugal. Her first novel A Bad Character was published to critical acclaim in 2014 and shortlisted for major Indian awards. In France it was shortlisted for the Prix Médicis. Her second novel Age of Vice, the first part of a trilogy, was an instant NYT bestseller and published in 22 countries in 2023. It was named a Best Book of the Year by Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Oprah Daily, NPR and the Telegraph among other publications and shortlisted for the Prix Fragonard in France. It is currently being developed by FX for a major television series.

Author bio

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and one of New York Times best books since 2000. The first in a charming, joyful crime series set in 1920s Bangalore, featuring sari-wearing detective Kaveri and her husband Ramu. Harini Nagendra is the author of acclaimed historical crime series The Bangalore Detectives Club set in 1920's Bangalore. The New York times calls the novel one of their best books since 2000. She is a professor of ecology at Azim Premji University, Bangalore and a well-known public speaker and writer on issues of nature and sustainability. Harini also writes in the non-fiction space on nature and ecology. Harini Nagendra is the author of The Bangalore Detectives Club series which was her first crime fiction novel published in May, 2022. The sequel, Murder Under a Red Moon, was published in 2023, and the third book, A Nest of Vipers, published in May 2024. The New York Times has hailed The Bangalore Detectives Club as one of their best books since 2000. Harini is a professor of ecology at Azim Premji University, Bangalore and a well-known public speaker and writer on issues of nature and sustainability. She is internationally recognized for her scholarship on sustainability, with honors that include the 2009 Cozzarelli Prize from the US National Academy of Sciences, the 2013 Elinor Ostrom Senior Scholar award, and the 2017 Clarivate Web of Science award for interdisciplinary research in India. She also writes non-fiction and her non-fiction books include Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future, and three books co-authored with Seema Mundoli – Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India's Cities, So Many Leaves, and Cities and Canopies: Trees in Indian Cities, which received the 2020 Publishing Next Awards for best English non-fiction book in India, and was featured on the 2021 Green Literature Festival's honor list. Harini lives in Bangalore with her family, in a home filled with maps. She loves trees, mysteries, and traditional recipes.

Sonora Jha is the author of three books, the latest of which is the novel The Laughter, which won the 2024 Washington Book Award for Fiction and was named a Best Book of 2023 by the New Yorker, NPR, and others. The Laughter has been described by The New York Times as “a no holds barred comic achievement” and by Booklist as “a complete triumph.” It also won the AutHer Prize for Fiction and was long-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. After a career in journalism in India and Singapore, Sonora moved to the U.S. to earn a PhD in Political Communication and is now a professor and associate dean at Seattle University. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies at Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Playa Summer Lake, Richard Hugo House, and Residency L’Ancienne Auberge in France. An explosive, tense, and illuminating work of fiction, The Laughter is a fascinating portrait of privilege, radicalization, class, and modern academia that forces us to confront the assumptions we make, as both readers and as citizens. Dr. Oliver Harding, a tenured professor of English, is long settled into the routines of a divorced, aging academic. But his quiet, staid life is upended by his new colleague, Ruhaba Khan, a dynamic Pakistani Muslim law professor. Ruhaba unexpectedly ignites Oliver's long-dormant passions, a secret desire that quickly tips towards obsession after her teenaged nephew, Adil Alam, arrives from France to stay with her. Drawn to them, Oliver tries to reconcile his discomfort with the worlds from which they come, and to quiet his sense of dismay at the encroaching change they represent—both in background and in Ruhaba's spirited engagement with the student movements on campus. As Ruhaba seems attainable yet not, and as the women of his past taunt his memory, Oliver reacts in ways shocking and devastating.

Karthik Ramanna is a professor of business and public policy at the University of Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government, where he's served as director of one of the world's most diverse leadership programs. Formerly a professor at Harvard Business School, he is an expert on business-government affairs and has won numerous awards, including the international Case Centre's Outstanding Case Writer prize, dubbed by the Financial Times as "the business school Oscars." Praise for The Age of Outrage: "In a world prone to outrage, leaders must navigate with grace, resilience, and strategic insight. This book provides the tools for ensuring your organization not only endures but thrives." — Frances Frei, Professor, Harvard Business School; former Senior Vice President, Uber; and coauthor, Move Fast and Fix Things "We live in an era of outrage and outages, and Ramanna has masterfully created a very thoughtful and timely leadership playbook to deal with these complex issues." — Koushik Chatterjee, Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer, Tata Steel "Karthik Ramanna helps CEOs and other top leaders survive a crisis in the age of social media. His chapter on temperate leadership should be required reading for executives from Wall Street to Main Street." — Brooke Masters, US Financial Editor, Financial Times "A must-read for those looking to lead effectively in an era where outrage seems omnipresent." — Sir Sajid Javid, former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer; former UK Home Secretary; and former Conservative Party MP "Karthik Ramanna's framework for how to shape and live by your organization's values should be required reading for leaders making decisions that will determine our future." — Congressman Seth Moulton, US House of Representatives (D-Massachusetts); former candidate, Democratic nomination for US President "Karthik Ramanna has produced a user's manual for the current context. Not taking sides, he helps leaders in both the private and public sectors understand the instability of this moment—and act accordingly." — David Rhodes, Executive Chairman, Sky News Group; former President, CBS News; former Vice President, Fox News

Alzheimer's is a ruthless and rampant disease that kills silently and unsparingly. It is fast becoming a household disease. However, this dreadful disease can be thwarted before its fatal explosion. How can one anticipate and prevent Alzheimer's before it becomes a full-blown disease? Are there precautions to take? How does one care for a loved one who falls prey to Alzheimer's? How can a caregiver cope with the emotional upheavals when taking care of their loved one who does not even remember who, what and when they forgot? Can meditation help prevent dementia? In this book, internationally renowned physician and winner of the prestigious Nautilus Award Dr. Sen addresses these pressing questions and concerns. Offering a brilliant, insightful and encircling embrace for both the patient and their caregiver, this book redefines the understanding of a disease that is the most common cause of dementia. This book is your chance to find courage, hope and confront Alzheimer's head-on. Dr. Shuvendu Sen, received the Men of Distinction Award from NY State Senate, the Nautilus Award and the Pushcart Award nomination. He has contributed to The Times of India, The Telegraph, The Daily News, BBC and The Star-Ledger. His recent book, The Fight Against Alzheimer's is an Amazon best-seller ranking # 1 under Mental Health. A documentary made on his works has been screened at the United Nations and at the Marche du Films, Cannes Film Festival. Dr. Sen is currently Vice-Chair, Research, Jersey Shore University Medical Center. He serves in the Advisory Board of the IAAC. Dr. Sen received the Men of Distinction Award from New York State Senate Committee, Oscar E. Edwards Award from American College of Physicians, the Nautilus Award and Pushcart Award Nomination for his contributions to Literature and Medicine. Dr. Sen has contributed to major newspaper and media outlets including BBC, The Telegraph, The Statesman, The Times of India, The Daily News and The Star-Ledger. Featured and endorsed by the Times of India and the CNN, Dr. Sen's recently published book, The Fight Against Alzheimer's (Rupa Publications, 2024) has been an Amazon best-seller ranking # 1 under Mental Health and Neuroscience. His previous works include A Doctor's Diary, (Times Group Books, 2014), Why Buddha Never Had Alzheimer's (HCI/Simon & Schuster, 2017), Behind the Blue Veil (Light Hearted Meals Press, 2006). His works have been translated into French, Italian and other languages. The Government of Maharashtra produced a Documentary based on Dr. Sen's works. The Documentary has been screened at the United Nations and at the Marche du Films during the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Dr. Sen has been invited to address United Nations officials, the New Jersey State Senate, Harvard University, Barnes and Nobles, Indo Global Summit, World Book Fair, The Indian Museum, CNN, CBS, PBS, WFLA (MSNBC Affiliate), All India Radio, among others.

Author bio

An emotionally rich collection of short stories, painting a fascinating portrait of contemporary India and its diaspora and a yearning rendering of the people and places we call home, from a major new literary talent. Vivid, vibrant, and unwaveringly affecting, The Best Possible Experience brings us intimate, impeccably realized accounts of individuals living in one of the most populous countries in the world, and its American diaspora, all haunted, in every sense of the word, by a loss of home. Classically elegant in prose and consistently modern in outlook, Injam’s stories question what it means to have a home, to return home, and show, above all, that home is not a place so much as a people ready to accept you as you are. We see a young man trapped on a bus to visit his parents as his fellow passengers vanish into the restroom. A family, newly in America, determined to host a perfect luncheon for their son’s white classmate, with no idea what to serve him. A woman who returns to a small village in India every summer to visit the grandfather who raised her, who lives with the ghosts of his son and wife. And a man preparing for his Green Card interview with the American woman he’s paid to marry him. A sui generis talent, Injam first started writing after coming to America from India in his twenties. The Best Possible Experience, his profoundly personal debut collection, delivers a universal inquiry into the idea of belonging and preserves in writing a home he left behind before it was lost to him forever. “Stunning…Injam’s narratives strike a perfect balance of darkness and light.”—New York Times Book Review "So rich and so beautiful."—Sacha Pfeiffer, NPR's "Weekend Edition" "Hilarious, heartrending, and wise, Nishanth Injam's stories made me want to cast all else aside and return home.”—Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning NISHANTH INJAM received an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michi­gan. He received a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and a Cecelia Joyce Johnson Award from the Key West Literary Seminar. His work has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review (which won the 2022 ASME Award for Fiction for its publication of his story), Catapult’s Best Debut Short Stories 2021, and The Best American Magazine Writing 2022. Born in Telangana, India, he now lives in Chicago.

Moderator bio

Tripurdaman Singh is a historian and writer, and currently an Ambizione Research Fellow at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. He was previously a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of London, and has held visiting fellowships at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, Fondation Maison des Sciences de L’Homme in Paris, and the University of Basel in Switzerland. His books include Imperial Sovereignty and Local Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Nehru (William Collins, 2021) and the Ram Nath Goenka Award-winning Sixteen Stormy Days (Bloomsbury, 2024). In 2024 he was awarded the Dan David Prize for ‘outstanding contribution to scholarship that illuminates the past’. Sixteen Stormy Days narrates the riveting history of the First Amendment to the Constitution of India, one of the most pivotal events in Indian political and constitutional history. Passed in June 1951 in the face of tremendous opposition within and outside Parliament, the subject of some of independent India’s fiercest parliamentary debates, the First Amendment drastically curbed freedom of speech; enabled caste-based reservation by restricting freedom against discrimination; circumscribed the right to property and validated abolition of the zamindari system; and fashioned a special schedule of unconstitutional laws immune to judicial challenge. Enacted months before India’s inaugural election, the amendment represents the most profound changes that the Constitution has ever seen. What extraordinary set of events led to India’s Constitution, dubbed the ‘world’s greatest experiment in liberal democracy’ at its birth in 1950, being so radically amended in 1951? Exploring the First Amendment’s stormy past and its contentious present, and drawing on parliamentary debates, press reports, judicial pronouncements, official correspondence and existing scholarship, Sixteen Stormy Days challenges conventional wisdom on iconic figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru, B.R. Ambedkar, Rajendra Prasad, Sardar Patel and Shyama Prasad Mookerji, and lays bare the vast gulf between the liberal promise of India’s Constitution and the authoritarian impulses of her first government. TRIPURDAMAN SINGH is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, UK. Born in Agra, Uttar Pradesh, Tripurdaman read politics and international studies at the University of Warwick, and subsequently earned an MPhil in modern South Asian studies and a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge, UK. He has been a visiting fellow at the University of Leiden and the Fondation Maison des Sciences de L’Homme, Paris. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, Tripurdaman’s books include Imperial Sovereignty and Local Politics (2019) and Nehru (2021).

Manoj Salve, India's top lawyer, faces a career-shattering revelation: his law degree is fake. Amidst media frenzy and estrangement from his daughter Sasha, he returns to college, battling personal and professional demons. Will Manoj reclaim his legacy and mend the bond with Sasha? Divya Prakash Dubey, a distinguished author, has penned 7 bestsellers, captivating readers with his literary prowess. His 7 audio shows on Amazon Audible have garnered immense love and popularity. Notably, he has contributed dialogues to the films PS1 & PS2, directed by the renowned Mani Ratnam, and to the web series "Dr. Arora," created by Imtiaz Ali on Sonyliv. Having previously excelled as a Corporate Marketing professional and content editor at a leading channel, Divya Prakash now dedicates himself entirely to writing. He crafts compelling narratives for movies, web series, and audio shows through his writer's room. He represents a new wave of Hindi authors who are reshaping the landscape of literature, rewriting the rules of the game.

Amitava Kumar is the author of several works of nonfiction and four novels. His novel Immigrant, Montana was on the best of the year lists at The New Yorker, The New York Times, and President Obama’s list of favorite books of 2018. His 2021 novel A Time Outside This Time was described by the New Yorker magazine as “a shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist.” Kumar’s latest novel is My Beloved Life and was described by James Wood as “beautiful, truthful fiction.” Kumar's work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, Harper’s, BRICK, Guernica, The Nation and several other publications. He has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and was a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library for 2023-24. He is a professor of English at Vassar College.

Priya Doraswamy founded the Lotus Lane Literary agency in 2013. She is passionate and dedicated to the intentional expansion of diversity and inclusivity in the publishing and film/tv industries. She has sold hundreds of works of fiction and non-fiction globally. Her clients have won several prestigious awards including long listed for the Booker Prize, The National Book Award, and The Faulkner Pen America Prize. Among her many exciting projects, she's proud to be an Executive Producer on 2024 Oscar nominated documentary To Kill A Tiger. Priya serves on the Board and on the Contracts Committee of the American Association of Literary Agents. She is also a member of the Women's Media Group.

For A.K. Ramanujan, who infused his diverse knowledge of Indian literatures and traditions into his poetry, the idea of Soma, the mysterious plant used by Vedic priests to extract ambrosia, fed his creativity. Sifting through Ramanujan’s archives, the editors discovered a series of unpublished ‘Soma poems’ whose style and theme set them apart from his earlier work. This volume includes these poems besides essays and an interview that contextualize them. It also contains a foreword written by the poet and critic A.K. Mehrotra. Krishna Ramanujan’s essay ‘Hummel’s Miracle: The Search for Soma’ explores the connections between the poems and the quest for the plant’s identity from the 1960s to the present. ‘The “Ordinary Mystery” Trip: Soma in A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetry’ by Guillermo Rodriguez dives deep into Ramanujan’s layered perspective on Soma. ‘The Post-Vedic History of the Soma Plant’, by Wendy Doniger, which influenced Ramanujan’s perception of Soma, originally published in 1968, is reprinted here with a special preface. The interview conducted in Chicago in 1982 between Malayali poet K. Ayyappa Paniker and Ramanujan offers a peek into Ramanujan’s perspectives on poetry and translation. While Soma focuses on A.K. Ramanujan’s poems and his creative mindset as an expatriate in America, it also provides a glimpse into a fascinating period in Western Indology when Indian philosophies and traditions were debated, some of which became so ingrained that they influence contemporary culture to this day.