Authors on our shelves

A former newspaper sub-editor, Arjun writes crime novels set in a city he describes as 'too old to be surprised'. His Inspector Meera Rao books have…

Leela Krishnan's literary novels are set in houses with too many rooms and not enough honesty. She lives in Chennai with two cats.

Meera Iyer grew up above her grandfather's printing press in Basavanagudi. Her novels follow families who stay in one city long enough to watch it…

Nandini Rao is a physicist turned novelist. Her Ashvattha Cycle began as bedtime stories for her nieces and grew into a trilogy.

Tara Menon writes and illustrates picture books from a studio full of plants. The Tiffin Box Detectives began with her son's lost lunch.

Ananya Desai writes about work and money for people who would rather be reading novels. She ran a bookshop for nine years before her first book.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a doctor who created Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, the most famous detective partnership in fiction.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) wrote serial novels full of orphans, fog and unforgettable names, read aloud in kitchens across Victorian England.

Dev Malik writes taut, short thrillers set in the hills. He spent twelve years as a mountain rescue volunteer.

Ira Banerjee writes science fiction about the near future of Indian cities, often with a dog somewhere in the plot.

Jane Austen (1775-1817) wrote six novels of manners whose wit and sharp eye for money, marriage and self-deception still feel modern.

Kabir Sethi teaches history at a college in North Delhi and writes narrative non-fiction about the objects ordinary people kept.

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) was a mathematics lecturer at Oxford who told a story on a river trip that became Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) drew on her own family for Little Women, the story of the four March sisters.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) began Frankenstein at nineteen, on a stormy summer by Lake Geneva, and gave the world its first great science fiction novel.

Premchand (1880-1936) wrote some of the finest novels and short stories in Hindi and Urdu, about village life, debt and dignity.

Priya Nair is a food writer whose essays on Kerala kitchens have been collected in two books.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), poet, novelist, composer and painter, was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913.

Hyderabad poet whose collections follow the Deccan through its seasons. He reads every winter across the south.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in Bombay; The Jungle Book grew from the stories of his Indian childhood.

Sameer Kulkarni is a farmer's son and a software engineer who writes slow, funny novels about small towns.

Vikram Joshi writes young adult novels about the year everything changes: board exams, first heartbreak, the move to a new city.