The Book of Indian King Stories & Essays

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Salman Rushdie is the author of thirteen novels: Grimus, Midnight’s Children(which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981), Shame, The Satanic Verses,Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, and The Golden House. His fourteenth novel, Quichotte, is forthcoming from Random House in the Fall of 2019. Rushdie is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and four works of non-fiction – Joseph Anton – A Memoir, Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, and Step Across This Line. He is the co-editor of Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writing, and of the 2008 Best American Short Stories anthology. A Fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature, Salman Rushdie has received, among other honours, the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (twice), the Writers’ Guild Award, the James Tait Black Prize, the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature, Author of the Year Prizes in both Britain and Germany, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour in Italy, the Crossword Book Award in India, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the London International Writers’ Award, the James Joyce award of University College Dublin, the St Louis Literary Prize, the Carl Sandburg Prize of the Chicago Public Library, and a U.S. National Arts Award. He holds honorary doctorates and fellowships at six European and six American universities, is an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T, and University Distinguished Professor at Emory University. Currently, Rushdie is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He has received the Freedom of the City in Mexico City, Strasbourg and El Paso, and the Edgerton Prize of the American Civil Liberties Union. He holds the rank of Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres – France’s highest artistic honour. Between 2004 and 2006 he served as President of PEN American Center and for ten years served as the Chairman of the PEN World Voices International Literary Festival, which he helped to create. In June 2007 he received a Knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. In 2008 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a Library Lion of the New York Public Library. In addition, Midnight’s Children was named the Best of the Booker – the best winner in the award’s 40 year history – by a public vote. His books have been translated into over forty languages. He has adapted Midnight’s Children for the stage. It was performed in London and New York by the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2004, an opera based upon Haroun and the Sea of Stories was premiered by the New York City Opera at Lincoln Center.

Romila Thapar

Romila Thapar (born 30 November 1931) is an Indian historian. Her principal area of study is ancient India, a field in which she is pre-eminent. Thapar is a Professor of Ancient History, Emerita, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Thapar's special contribution is the use of social-historical methods to understand change in the mid-first millennium BCE in northern India. As lineage-based Indo-Aryan pastoral groups moved into the Gangetic Plain, they created rudimentary forms caste-based states. The epics Ramayana and the Mahabharata, in her analysis, offer vignettes of how these groups and others negotiated new, more complex, forms of loyalty in which stratification, purity, and exclusion played a greater if still fluid role. The author of From Lineage to State, Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, Early India: From Origins to AD 1300, and the popular History of India, Part I, Thapar has received honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago, the University of Oxford, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Calcutta, the University of Hyderabad, Brown University, and the University of Pretoria. Thapar is an Honourary Fellow of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, where she also received her Ph.D. in 1958, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2008, Romila Thapar shared the US Library of Congress's Kluge Prize, for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Abraham Eraly

Abraham Eraly (15 August 1934—8 April 2015) was an Indian writer of history, a teacher, and the founder of Chennai-based magazine Aside. Eraly's earliest publications were poems and short stories. His historical writing career started while at Madras Christian College. Dissatisfied with the material he used to teach history, he began to write a series of books on Indian history. The Gem in the Lotus covered its earliest period, while The Last Spring continued the narration to the end of the Mughal Empire. Eraly's style of historical story-telling made him particularly approachable for non-historians but could also be used as a reliable source on the Mughal period in India

Kalki

Manu S. Pillai

Manu S. Pillai (born 1990) is an Indian author and historian. Manu S. Pillai was born in Mavelikkara, Kerala in 1990. He grew up in Pune. He got his Bachelor's Degree in Economics from Fergusson College, Pune. He got a Master's Degree in International Relations from King's College London. Following his education, he worked with the Parliamentary office of Shashi Tharoor in New Delhi and Lord Karan Bilimoria in London. He also worked as a researcher on the BBC Series, Incarnations with Sunil Khilnani, which tells the story of India through fifty great lives. In 2017, he became a full time historian and writer. He is currently pursuing his PhD at King's College, London. Pillai is known for his debut non-fiction The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore for which he won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2017. The story is expected to be adapted into a web series by Arka Mediaworks. Rebel Sultans, Pillai's second work, narrates the story of the Deccan from the close of the thirteenth century to the dawn of the eighteenth century. His most recent book is The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin. He has announced that he is working on his next work which is due for publishing in 2022