- Arundhati Arundhati Roy
Suzanna Arundhati Roy (born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, writer and activist. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel, "The God of Small Things", and, in 2002, the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.
- Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri Vourvoulias is a contemporary Indian American author based in New York City.
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (born February 24 1942) is a literary critic and theorist. She is best-known for the article "Can the Subaltern Speak?", which is considered a founding text of postcolonialism, and also for her translation of Jacques Derrida's "Of Grammatology". Spivak teaches at Columbia University, where she was promoted to University Professor -- Columbia's highest rank -- in March 2007.
- Nabanita Dev Sen
Nabaneeta Dev Sen is a Bengali writer. Sen has published more than 56 books in Bengali: poetry, novels, short stories, plays, literary criticism, personal essays, travelogues, humour writing, translations and children’s literature.
- Antara Dev Sen
Antara Dev Sen is a renowned Indian journalist, and the elder daughter of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and his first wife, Nabanita Dev Sen. Anatara did her schooling in Calcutta and higher education in Delhi, India. She then joined the Hindustan Times. As a senior editor of the "Hindustan Times", she went to Oxford University on a fellowship from the Reuter Foundation. On her return to Delhi, she started "The Little Magazine" and was its founding editor.
- Sudha Murthy
Sudha Murthy is an Indian social worker and accomplished author. She is known for her philanthropic work through the Infosys Foundation. Among other things, she has initiated a move to provide all government schools in Karnataka with computer and library facilities. She also teaches computer science and writes fiction. "Dollar Bahu" ("Dollar daughter-in-law"), a book she wrote, was adapted to a television serial in 2001. She completed her M.Tech.
- Shobha De
Shobhaa Dé is an Indian columnist and novelist often called India's Jackie Collins. Born Shobha Rajadhyaksha in a Maharashtrian Saraswat Brahmin family, she graduated from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai with a degree in psychology. After making her name as a model, she began a career in journalism in 1970, in the course of which she founded and edited three popular magazines - Stardust, "Society", and "Celebrity".
- Urvashi Butalia
Urvashi Butalia is an Indian feminist and historian. She is the Director and Co-founder of Kali for Women, India's first feminist publishing house. Butalia was born in Ambala India in 1952. She earned a B.A. in literature from Miranda House, Delhi University in 1971, a Masters in literature from Delhi University in 1973, and a Masters in South Asian Studies from the University of London in 1977.
- Mahasweta Devi
Mahasweta Devi is an Indian writer.
- Akka Mahadevi
Akka Mahadevi (ಅಕ್ಕ ಮಹಾದೇವಿ) Born to Nirmala and Sumati in Udatadi (or Udugani) near the ancient city of Banavasi (in Shikaripura taluk Shimoga district) in a Shiva temple was a prominent figure of the Veerashaiva Bhakti movement in 12th century Karnataka. Her Vachanas, a form of poetry are considered her greatest contribution to Kannada Bhakti literature.
- Kiran Desai
Kiran Desai (born 3 September 1971) is an Indian author who is a citizen of India and a Permanent Resident of the United States. Her novel "The Inheritance of Loss" won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. She is the daughter of the noted author Anita Desai.
- Simran Sethi
Simran Sethi (born October 12, 1970, in Munich, Germany) is a Sikh American journalist, television producer and activist. She graduated cum laude in 1992 from Smith College with a BA in sociology and gender studies. In 2005, Sethi was awarded a MBA by the Presidio School of Management in San Francisco. Sethi began her media career in 1993 as a documentary film producer for MTV. In 1994, she became a host/producer for MTV Networks Asia News, …
- Kamla Bhatt
Kamla Bhatt is India's premier blogger and India's first podcaster. She is also a freelance writer and researcher. Kamla is a featured podcaster contributor to the IndiaTech feature on Silicon Valley's PodTech.Net. Her popular radio / podcast show is called Kamla Bhatt Show.
- Ayesha Jalal
Ayesha Jalal is a Pakistani-American historian. She is a professor of history at Tufts University and a MacArthur Fellow. The bulk of her work deals with the creation of Muslim identities in modern South Asia. She is the daughter of Hamid Jalal, a nephew of the famous Urdu fiction writer Manto and a civil servant. Ms. Jalal came to New York at the age of 16.
- Romila Thapar
Romila Thapar (born 1931) is an Indian historian whose principal area of study is Ancient India.
- Kamini Roy
Kamini Roy (12 October 1864 - 27 September 1933) was a leading Bengali poet, social worker and feminist from India. She was the first woman honours graduate in India.
- Sister Nivedita
Margaret Elizabeth Noble (1867-1911), better known as Sister Nivedita, was an Anglo-Irish social worker, author, teacher and disciple of Swami Vivekananda. She met Vivekananda in 1895 in London and travelled to India (Kolkata) in 1898. Swami Vivekananda gave her the name Nivedita (which means one who is dedicated to God) on March 25 1898. In November 1898 she started a school for girls.
- Mahadevi Varma
Mahadevi Varma was one of the most famous modern Hindi poets. She is widely regarded as the 'modern Meera. She was a major poet of the Chhayavaad generation, a period of romanticism in Modern Hindi poetry. She won the Jnanpith award in 1982.
- Qurratulain Haider
Qurratulain Haider (b. 1927, also written Qurat-ul-ain) is an Indian writer of Urdu fiction. She was born at Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh and went to Delhi's Indraprastha College. She has written 12 novels and novellas, and many short stories. Her best known novel is the epic "Aag ki Darya" (The River of Fire), a massive historical tale that moves from the fourth century BC to the modern period, and which the author herself translated into English.
- Abha Dawesar
Abha Dawesar (born January 1, 1974) is an Indian novelist writing in English. Dawesar is a Harvard graduate and lives in New York.
- Sujata Bhatt
<sub></sub>Sujata Bhatt (born 1956) is an Indian poet, a native speaker of Gujarati. She has written many poems, most prominent of which is the English poem "Search for My Tongue". This poem is one in a section of "Poems from Different Cultures" in an anthology that is compulsory study for many fourteen to sixteen-year-olds in the United Kingdom. Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, and brought up in Pune until 1968, when she emigrated to the United States with her family.
- Thrity Umrigar
Thrity Umrigar is an Indian writer, who was born in Mumbai and immigrated to the United States when she was 21. She is a journalist and the author of the novels Bombay Time and The Space Between Us. She has written for the Washington Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer, among other newspapers, and regularly writes for The Boston Globe's book pages.
- Asha Sharma
Asha Sharma (nee Stokes) is a granddaughter of Satyananda Stokes and wrote a book about his life, "An American In Khadi", in 1999. She received her early education in Shimla, then later attended the Columbia University school of journalism in New York. She has taught at universities as well as working as a correspondent and became a fellow of the Indian Council of Historical Research and later a research associate at Berkeley.
- Nayantara Sahgal
Nayantara Sahgal (born 10 May 1927) is the second of the three daughters born to Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and her husband Ranjit Sitaram Pandit. She is a well-regarded writer in the English language. Her fiction deals with India's elite dealing with the crises related to political change. Her father was a successful barrister and classical scholar who translated Raj Tarangini into English from Sanskrit. He died in Lucknow prison jail in 1944, …
- Balamani Amma
Padmabhushan Nalappat Balamani Amma (19 July, 1909 - 29 September, 2004) was a Malayali poet. Considered by many to be one of the best Malayali poets, she won the highest literary medal in India, the Saraswathi Samman. She was married to newspaper editor, V.M. Nair, and was the mother of the writer Kamala Das who has translated one of her mother's poems, "The Pen", which describes the loneliness of a mother.
- Amita Kanekar
Amita Kanekar is a Mumbai-based writer, whose well-received debut novel "A Spoke in the Wheel" was published by Harper Collins Publishers, India. Kanekar teaches comparative mythology at the University of Mumbai. She was born in Goa in 1965. She is currently (2006) working on her second novel. She has lived in the U.S. as a child, and also teaches Architectural History.
- Rashid Jahan
Rashid Jahan</sup> (1905 – 1952) was an Indian writer who inaugurated a new era of Urdu literature written by women. She wrote short-stories and plays and is perhaps best remembered for her involvement with the explosive "Angarey" (1931), a collection of pathbreaking and unconventional short stories written by young writers in Urdu like Sajjad Zaheer and Ahmed Ali. She was born in Aligarh. Her father, Sheikh Abdullah (not to be confused with the 'Sher-e-Kashmir'), …
- Toru Dutt
Toru Dutt (March 4, 1856 - August 30, 1877) was an English and French poet and author, who made a mark in literature in spite of her premature death.
- Paromita Chatterjee
Paromita Chatterjee was previously an anchor of CNBC-TV18, an Indian channel which is a partnership between the popular TV channel CNBC of USA and TV-18, which is a content production company, based in New Delhi. Now, Even though she works for TV-18, she now appears in another TV channel called CNN-IBN which is also co-owned by TV-18.
- Seema Mustafa
Seema Mustafa (b ~1955) is an Indian journalist. She is the Political Editor and Delhi Bureau Chief of "The Asian Age" newspaper published in India. Her op-ed columns appear regularly on Saturdays. These are syndicated to several newspapers, including "The Deccan Chronicle" from Bangalore, India and "The Dawn" newspaper of Pakistan.
- Shashi Deshpande
Shashi Deshpande (b.1938). She is a daughter of famous dramatist and writer Shriranga. Shashi Deshpande is an award-winning Indian novelist. She published her first collection of short stories in 1978, and her first novel in 1980. She is a winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award for the novel "That Long Silence". Her works also include children's books.
- Ashapoorna Devi
Ashapoorna Devi, also Ashapurna Debi or Asha Purna Devi, is a prominent Bengali novelist and poet. She was born in 1909. She has been widely honoured with a number of prizes and awards. She was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 1976; D.Litt by the Universities of Jabalpur, Rabindra Bharati, Burdwan and Jadavpur. Vishwa Bharati University honoured her with Deshikottama in 1989.
- Baby Halder
Baby Halder (or Haldar) (born 1973 or 1974 in West Bengal) is an Indian housekeeper and author whose autobiography "Aalo Aandhari" or "A Life Less Ordinary" (ISBN 81-89013-67-X) describes her harsh life. Abandoned by her mother at age 7, raised by a neglectful father and married off at age 12, …
- Shanta Shelke
Shanta Janardan Shelke (Born October 19, 1922. Died June 6, 2002) was a gifted Marathi poetess and writer. Apart from this she has been a journalist, a professor, composer, story writer, translator, written child literature, presided over literature gatherings and more. Some of her compositions became immortal as either stand-alone poetic works or as songs sung by marathi greats like Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosale and Kishori Amonkar, to name a few.
- Sujata Madhok
Sujata Madhok is an Indian activist and developmental journalist specializing in women's issues. She started her career at the Democratic World Weekly. She also worked for the Youth Times, the Children's Book Trust, and The Statesman. She then moved on to the "Hindustan Times". From 1989 to 2000, she was Editor of Women's Feature Service, …
- Mrinal Pande
Mrinal Pande (born 1946) is the chief editor of "Hindustan", a Hindi periodical. She was born in Tikamgarh, Madhya Pradesh. She is the daughter of the Hindi novelist Shivani. Earlier she has worked for Doordarshan and STAR News. She has also written few short stories. She was the editor of the popular women's magazine "Vama" from 1984-87. She studied in Nainital and then completed her Master's degree from Allahabad University.
- Sooni Taraporevala
Sooni Taraporevala (born in 1957) is an internationally acclaimed screenwriter and photographer, currently based in India. She is best known as the screenwriter of "Mississippi Masala", "The Namesake" and Oscar-nominated "Salaam Bombay", all directed by Mira Nair. She directed her first feature film, based on a screenplay of her own, an ensemble piece set in Bombay, in Spring, 2007. The working title of the film is "Little Zizou."
- Maria Aurora Couto
Maria Aurora Couto is a writer based in Goa, India. She taught English literature in colleges in India (particularly New Delhi) and has contributed to periodicals in India and the UK. Currently she lives in the North Goa village of Aldona, together with her husband Alban Couto, a senior civil servant in the Government of Goa and in other parts of India. Couto has authored Graham Greene: On the Frontier, Politics and Religion in the NovelsMacmillan, London 1986, …
- Anita Nair
Anita Nair is a popular Indian-English writer. She was born at Mundakottakurissi, near Shornur in Kerala State. She was working as the creative director of an advertising agency in Bangalore when she wrote her first book, a collection of short stories called "Satyr of the Subway", which she sold it to Har-Anand Press. The book won her a fellowship from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her second book was published by Penguin India, …
- Lalitha Lenin
Lalitha Lenin, Thrithalloor, Thrissur district) is a renowned poet in Malayalam. K. K. Lalitha Bai (her official name) was also the Head of the Department of Library and Information Science, University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram. In addition, she was a member in the Senate and Academic Council of the University of Kerala, General Council of Kerala Sahitya Academy, Jansikshan Sansthan Management Board, Governing Body of the State Institute of Children’s Literature, …