Advisory Members
Annie Zaidi
Annie Zaidi is the author of Bread, Cement, Cactus: A memoir of belonging and dislocation, Prelude to a Riot, Gulab, Love Stories # 1 to 14, Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales, and the co-author of The Good Indian Girl. She is the editor of Unbound: 2000 Years of Indian Women's Writing and Equal Halves. She is the recipient of the Tata Literature Live Award for fiction (2020), the Nine Dots Prize for innovative thinking (2019) and The Hindu Playwright Award (2018) for her play, Untitled 1.
Ira Pande
Ira Pande worked as a lecturer in Panjab University for 16 years, teaching English Literature to post-graduate students. Then, she built a career in editing and publishing, spending almost 20 years in various well-known publishing houses. Her final assignment before retiring from an active career was as Chief Editor of the India International Centre's Publications Division. She has also written a memoir of her mother, the late Shivani, titled Diddi: My Mother's Voice. She is a translator of several books and was awarded the Sahitya Akademi prize for her translation of Manohar Shyam Joshi's T'ta Professor in 2011. She also writes a fortnightly column for The Tribune.
Rakshanda Jalil
Dr Rakhshanda Jalil is a multi-award-winning translator, writer, and literary historian. She has published over 25 books and written over 50 academic papers and essays. Her book on the lesser-known monuments of Delhi, Invisible City (2008), continues to be a bestsellerHer latest book is But You Don’t Look Like a Muslim (Harper Collins), a collection of 40 essays on religion, culture, literature and identity.
She runs an organization called Hindustani Awaaz, devoted to the popularization of Hindi-Urdu literature and culture. Her debut collection of fiction, Release & Other Stories, was published by Harper Collins in 2011, and received critical acclaim. She was awarded the Kaifi Azmi Award for her contribution to Urdu, the First Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu-Hindi Translation and the Distinguished Translator Award by Vani Prakashan at Jaipur Litfest. She writes regularly for major newspapers such as Hindustan Times, Indian Express, The Hindu as well as magazines such as Outlook, Scroll, The Wire, etc. She is the Editor of the Taj magazine, a bi-annual book-length journal of the Taj group of hotels