Bio

Smita Bellur is a trained Hindustani Classical Sufi singer who has performed at more than 500 venues. Her deep engagement with mysticism and over twenty years of Khayal singing (north Indian classical music) enriches her music. With over 4.3M views on Youtube & 235,000 streams on Spotify, Smita Rao Bellur’s reach as a soulful Sufi singer is growing. Her renditions “Hamari Atariya” for the Netflix series “Ye Kaali Kaali Aankhen” and the “Maanav Adhikar” song, for the National Human Rights Commission, Govt. of India have won her appreciation.

Smita has performed at prestigious festivals such as Jodhpur RIFF, Spree Paisley Festival (Scotland), Jahan-e-Khusrau (Delhi), Rajgir Utsav, Kalaghoda Arts Festival, to name a few. She is a BE, MS (BITS, Pilani) and has worked for tech giants like Oracle and SAP. Smita is now a full-time musician.

Bio coming soon.

Bio coming soon.

Bio

Sumana Chandrashekar is a ghatam player, author and researcher and a long time student of Carnatic vocal music. She has performed extensively, has worked on several experimental and collaborative music projects and projects in music education. She has travelled widely in India and has worked closely with artists and artist communities. Her book Song of the Clay Pot came out in 2025.

Bio

Saitejas Chandrashekar is a singer, multi-instrumentalist, composer and music educator. He has extensive training in Carnatic vocal and Hindustani semi-classical music. He has pioneered the Harmonica in Carnatic music. He is the Director of Hamsanada Foundation, an organisation dedicated to teaching and promoting Indian music on the Harmonica across all genres. Saitejas has performed widely across India.

Bio

Miglė Anušauskaitė is a comic artist and a Judaica researcher, living and working in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her three graphic novels on Lithuanian historical personalities have won various literary prizes. She has drawn comics on semiotics, feminist film theory, and has a literary comics column in a cultural newspaper „Šiaurės Atėnai“ running for over 10 years. Miglė has translated several books from English and from Yiddish, and recently debuted with a crime fiction radio play “Pasitikėjimo žaidimas” (“Game of Trust”) on the National Radio of Lithuania.

Bio

Ameena Hussein is a Sri Lankan author and co-founder of the Perera-Hussein Publishing House. Her non-fiction book Chasing Tall Tales and Mystics: Ibn Battuta in Sri Lanka won the State Literary Prize for Humanities, 2020. Her novel The Moon in the Water was longlisted for the
Man Asian Literary Award and the Dublin IMPAC.

Bio

Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern, and contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from Bengali and Hindi into English. He also translates fiction and poetry from English and Hindi into Bengali. Over 90 of his translations have been published so far in India, the UK, the USA, and Australia. He teaches at Ashoka University, where he is also the co-director of the Ashoka Centre for Translation, he mentors young translators, and he is the Books & Ideas Editor at Scroll.

Bio

Chaitanya Srivastava is a communications and PR strategist currently looking after marketing at Bloomsbury Publishing. Previously, he led publicity and marketing at Penguin Random House Southeast Asia, where he blended traditional publicity with digital storytelling to champion award-winning, bestselling, and critically acclaimed authors. His campaigns have won awards from the Singapore Book Publishers Association in both 2024 and 2025. Outside publishing, Chaitanya writes on books, culture, and lifestyle for Scroll India, Esquire, Elle, and The Federal.

Bio

Deepthi Talwar is an Editor with Westland.

Bio

Himanjali’s written many books for children and some for adults. Mrs C Remembers, her first novel for adults, won her the FICCI Award for Upcoming Author of the Year. She’s pleased that her latest novel, The Burnings, has made family and friends worry about what lives inside her head.

Bio

Karthik Venkatesh is Executive Editor with Penguin Random House India where he commissions and edits non-fiction and fiction. He is the author of two books for young adults: 10 Indian Languages and How They Came to Be and 10 Makers of the Indian Constitution and the editor of Where The Gods Dwell.

Bio

Kanishka Gupta runs Writer’s Side Literary Agency, the leading South Asian agency he founded in India. Among his notable authors are Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi (International Booker winners for Heart Lamp, 2025), Daisy Rockwell (International Booker winner for Tomb of Sand, 2022), Avni Doshi (Burnt Sugar, shortlisted for Booker prize 2020), and Jerry Pinto (Windham-Campbell prize, 2016). He has worked closely with the 2022 Booker winner, Shehan Karunatilaka on multiple projects.

In addition to his publishing endeavors, Kanishka curated a critically acclaimed series for Scroll.in titled “Publishing and the Pandemic.” This series features comprehensive reports, commentaries, and first-person accounts detailing the impact of the pandemic on publishing in the Indian subcontinent and beyond. If you are interested, you can access the series through this link: Publishing and the Pandemic.

Bio

With over fifteen years of experience in the publishing industry, Meenakshi leads marketing and publicity initiatives, overseeing brand strategy, communications, and campaign execution for a leading publishing house. Her expertise lies in building a book’s presence and connecting authors with their audiences through innovative and impactful public relations and marketing campaigns.

Bio

Sayantan Ghosh is the editorial director of Simon & Schuster India. His writings have appeared in Ambit Magazine, Electric Literature, The Quint, Firstpost, The Telegraph, The Hindu Business Line, The Times of India and numerous other publications. He was awarded the Editor of the Year award at the Publishing Next Industry Awards 2023. His first novel, Lonely People Meet, was published by Bloomsbury India in October 2025. He lives in New Delhi.

Bio

Rashmi Menon is Associate Publisher at HarperCollins India. She has been a part of publishing for seventeen years, commissioning and editing many bestselling works of fiction and non-fiction. Rashmi loves acquiring books that are both timely and timeless. When reading too many manuscripts makes her go cross-eyed, she switches to audiobooks in her non-stop quest to decode bestsellers.

Bio

Akhil P. Dharmajan is a Malayalam novelist and scriptwriter who rose to prominence through self-publishing his work on social media. Born in Alappuzha, Kerala, he started his career as an automobile mechanic before pursuing diplomas in mechanical engineering and filmmaking. His first novel, Ouija Board, was serialised on his Facebook page and then self-published with funds from his readers. His breakthrough came with the youth bestseller Ram c/o Anandhi, a novel set in Chennai exploring themes of love, identity, and social acceptance, including a prominent transgender character. This novel earned him the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2025, and more than 4 lac copies have been sold to date.

Akhil is also an established scriptwriter, having written the screenplay for the critically and commercially successful film 2018 – Everyone is a Hero, which was India’s official entry to the Oscars in 2023. His direct, cinematic, and relatable storytelling style has made him a leading voice in contemporary Malayalam popular fiction.

Bio

Celebrated for retelling epics from the vanquished’s perspective in bestsellers like Asura, Ajaya, and Vanara, Anand Neelakantan is one of India’s top authors. An acclaimed screenwriter for hit TV series and the official author of the Bāhubali prequel trilogy, his provocative narratives challenge established ideas of heroes and villains.

Bio

Archana Vasudev is a storyteller, scriptwriter and media professional with a Ph.D in Communication and Journalism (Film Studies) from the University of Madras. She has extensive experience in artist communications across Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam projects. Her script for the Malayalam film ‘Her’ won the Special Jury Award at the Kerala Film Critics Association Awards, 2024. Archana is also the founder of Talkative, a communications company.

Bio

Rohit Vedprakash is a creative producer with a career spanning over 20 years across film, streaming series, and advertising. Having worked at premier studios like Walt Disney India, UTV, and Fox Star Studios, his feature film credits include Maqbool, Mangal Pandey, Slumdog Millionaire, Fitoor, and Lootcase among others. Rohit also worked at Netflix India and was involved in setting up 13 Netflix Originals, including Season 2 of the acclaimed series, Delhi Crime, along with a host of popular ones such as Mismatched (Seasons 1 and 2), Khakee, The Fame Game, Killer Soup and Kohrra.

Bio

Ranjani Krishnakumar is a writer and entrepreneur, now, living in Chennai. She is the founder of emdash, a marketing and content consulting company. On the side, she also writes about films and television for various publications. Her essays have appeared in Indian Express, Fountain Ink, Firstpost, Huffington Post, Scroll, Pop Matters and Film Companion, among others.

She writes at www.tharkuri.in. She tweets at @_tharkuri.