An author is the developer or designer of any written work such as a book or play and is also contemplated a writer. More chiefly elucidated, an author is “the individual who sprang or detailed existence to anything” and whose origination shapes the competence for what was fabricated.
In this neoteric sphere, women have stepped into every area of expertise. One such area of expertise is “writing”.
Thereupon, the subsequent look-in can dispense you with “THE TOP TEN INDIAN FEMALE AUTHORS”.
- ANUJA CHAUHAN
Anuja Chauhan is an Indian author, screenwriter, and advertiser. She functioned in the advertising industry hitherto relinquishing to pursue a full-time literary existence. As a writer, she is acknowledged for The Zoya Factor (2008), Battle For Bittora (2010), Those Pricey Thakur Girls (2013), The House That BJ Built (2015) Baaz (2017), and Club You To Death (2021).
Born in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Anuja spent the lion’s share of her childhood in copious cantonment towns in North India, as her father served in the Indian Army. She is the youngest of four sisters: Padmini, Rohini, Nandini, and Anuja. Her older sister Nandini Bajpai is also an author.
She did her schooling at the Army Public School, New Delhi, Sophia Girls Convent, Meerut Cantonment and Delhi Public School, Mathura Road, New Delhi. She has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Miranda House, Delhi University, and a post-graduate diploma in mass communication from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
She sowed the seeds of working on her first novel in 2006. The Zoya Factor is about a client service representative with an advertising firm, who becomes the lucky mascot of the Indian cricket team.
The Zoya Factor secured Cosmopolitan Magazine’s India’s Fun Fearless Female award for literature (2008) and the India Today Woman Award for Woman as Storyteller (2009). The novel was preferenced for a film by Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment production company. Eventually, the rights were picked up by Pooja Shetty Deora’s Walkwater Films. The film, also entitled The Zoya Factor, directed by Abhishek Sharma, produced by Fox Star Studios, Adlabs and Walkwater films, with dialogues by Chauhan, and starring Sonam Kapoor and Dulquer Salmaan was released in September 2019.
Her second book, Battle For Bittora, was released in 2010 by actor Saif Ali Khan in Delhi in October 2010, to critical acclaim.
Tehelka called it a “worthy successor to The Zoya Factor.” According to Ira Pande, in Outlook magazine, Chauhan accomplishes to normalize a fresh lexicon materializing from the intense smash-up between Bharat and India that has all the potential of a mint fresh articulation. The Hindustan Times applauded the book for its therapy while communicating the “biggest vote” to the novel’s summarization.
The film rights for Battle of Bittora were picked up by production company Saregama for three years and then sold to Anil Kapoor Film Company. A film starring Fawad Khan and Sonam Kapoor, produced by Rhea Kapoor has been publicized.
Her third book, “Those Pricey Thakur Girls” was circulated in January 2013 and is the first in a series of novels about the Thakurs of Hailey Road, an upper-middle-class Rajput family of five alphabetically named sisters. The TV rights for the book were picked up by Zee Entertainment Network, which transfigured it into a daily soap, entitled Dilli Wali Thakur Girls, running on &TV, starring Sukirti Kandpal and Aamir Ali.
In early 2015, Anuja Chauhan replaced the publishers.
The trailer for “The House that BJ Built” was organized on 15 May 2015.
LiveMint’s review of the book said “The House That BJ Built gives its readers, and its characters, exactly what they paid for.”
Her fifth novel ‘Baaz’ (1 May 2017) is a mercurial saga of love and war set in 1971, at a fictitious Indian Air Force Base.
She introduced her sixth novel Club You To Death in February 2021. It is her first murder mystery, with integrands of romance and humor.
NOTABLE WORKS :
- THE ZOYA FACTOR
- BATTLE FOR BITTORA
- THOSE PRICEY THAKUR GIRLS
- THE HOUSE THAT BJ BUILT
- BAAZ
- CLUB YOU TO DEATH
- ARUNDHATI ROY
Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author renowned for her novel The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist associated with human rights and environmental causes.
Prior to her career, Roy worked in television and movies. She put down the screenplays for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989), a movie based on her experiences as a student of architecture, in which she also made an appearance as a performer, and Electric Moon (1992).
Roy won the National Film Award for Best Screenplay in 1988 for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones.
Roy began writing her first novel, The God of Small Things, in 1992, finalizing it in 1996. The book is semi-autobiographical and a considerable chunk encapsulates her childhood encounters in Aymanam.
The publication of The God of Small Things propelled Roy to international fame. It acquired the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction and was tabulated as one of The New York Times Notable Books of the Year. It got through the fourth position on The New York Times Bestsellers list for Independent Fiction. From the conception, the book was also a commercial accomplishment: Roy received half a million pounds as an advance. It was published in May, and the book had been sold in 18 countries by the end of June.
Since the achievement of her novel, Roy has written a television serial, The Banyan Tree, and the documentary DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy (2002).
In early 2007, Roy declared that she was working on a second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
She furnished to We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples, a book released in 2009, which traverses through the culture of peoples around the world, sketching their diverseness and denunciations to their quiddity.
She has written copious essays on neoteric politics and culture. In 2014, they were collected by Penguin India in a five-volume set. In 2019, her non-fiction was assembled in a single volume, My Seditious Heart, published by Haymarket Books.
Roy was awarded the 1997 Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things.
In January 2006, she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, a national award from India’s Academy of Letters, for her assemblage of essays on neoteric circulations.
In November 2011, she was awarded the Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Writing.
Roy was spotlighted in the 2014 list of Time 100, the 100 most influential people in the sphere.
NOTABLE WORKS :
- THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS
- THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS
- THE END OF IMAGINATION
- THE COST OF LIVING
- AN ORDINARY PERSON’S GUIDE TO EMPIRE
- BROKEN REPUBLIC
- CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning and chart-topping author, poet, activist and teacher of writing. Her work has been published in over 50 magazines, encompassing the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing has been incorporated in over 50 compendiums, comprising The Best American Short Stories, the O.Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her books have been interpreted into 29 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali, Russian and Japanese, and many of them have been used for campus-wide and city-wide reads. Many of her works have been made into films and plays. She resides in Houston with her husband Murthy and has two sons, Anand and Abhay. She loves to bridge with readers on her Facebook page and on Twitter.
Born in Kolkata, India, she came to the United States for her graduate studies, receiving a Master’s degree in English from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Divakaruni has judged considerable prestigious awards, such as the National Book Award and the PEN Faulkner Award. She is, herself, the winner of a number of awards, encompassing the American Book Award.
Two of her books, The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart, have been made into movies by filmmakers Gurinder Chadha and Paul Berges (an English film) and Suhasini Mani Ratnam (a Tamil TV serial) respectively. A short story, “The Word Love,” from her assemblage Arranged Marriage, was made into a bilingual short film in Bengali and English, titled Ammar Ma.
BELOW IS A PARTIAL LIST OF HER AWARDS:
- Outstanding Alumna, Wright State University, 2012.
- Light of India Award, Times of India, 2011.
- Cultural Jewel Award, Indian Culture Center, Houston, 2009
- University of California at Berkeley, International House Alumna of the Year, 2008
- South Asian Literary Association Distinguished Author Award, 2007
- Blubonnet List 2004, The Conch Bearer
- Best Books of 2003 List, Publishers Weekly, The Conch Bearer
- O’Henry Prize Stories Anthology, “The Lives of Strangers,” 2003
- Pushcart Prize, 2003.
- Best Books of 2002 List, Los Angeles Times, The Vine of Desire
- Best Books of 2002 List, San Francisco Chronicle, The Vine of Desire
- “Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter” included in Best American Short Stories, 1999
- Best Paperbacks of 1998 List, Seattle Times, The Mistress of Spices
NOTABLE WORKS :
- ARRANGED MARRIAGE
- THE MISTRESS OF SPICES
- SISTER OF MY HEART
- QUEEN OF DREAMS
- THE LIVES OF STRANGERS
- THE VINE OF DESIRE
- INDU SUNDARESAN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR :
Indu Sundaresan was born and brought up in India, on Air Force bases here and there in the country. By day, her father was a fighter pilot with the Indian Air Force, and, an enthusiastic storyteller by night. He told her stories of India’s kings and queens, and took her to roam around the splendid palaces and forts where they lived. It was preferable than being in a classroom.
After college, Indu came to the U.S. for graduate school and has an M.A. in economics and an M.S. in Operations Research. She initiated writing novels and short stories soon after. Her first two novels were practice runs, and they enlightened her how to write a book—beginning, middle, and end. And then, she communicated her first published novel, The Twentieth Wife.
She is the author of six books so far: the three novels of the Taj trilogy, The Twentieth Wife, The Feast of Roses and Shadow Princess; an assemblage of short stories, In the Convent of Little Flowers; a novel set in India during four days in May of 1942 titled The Splendor of Silence; and, a novel based on the Kohinoor diamond, The Mountain of Light.
The Twentieth Wife won the Washington State Book Award and has been transformed into a 42 episode television series called Siyaasat. It’s airing (with subtitles) on Netflix in many countries.
Indu is also the recipient of the Light of India award for Excellence in Literature. Her work has been interpreted into 23 languages worldwide. The translation that makes her contended and proud is that of the Taj trilogy novels in Tamil, her mother tongue, transliterated by her mother, Madhuram Sundaresan, and published by Vanathi Pathipaggam in Chennai, India.
She lives in the Seattle, Washington area with her husband and her daughter.
NOTABLE WORKS :
- THE TWENTIETH WIFE
- THE FEAST OF ROSES
- THE MOUNTAIN OF LIGHT
- SHADOW PRINCESS
- THE SPLENDOR OF SILENCE
- IN THE CONVENT OF LITTLE FLOWERS
- KIRAN DESAI
Kiran Desai is an Indian author. Her novel, The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. In January 2015, The Economic Times enumerated her as one of 20 “most influential” inter-continental Indian women.
Kiran Desai is the daughter of Anita Desai. She was born in Delhi, and spent the early years of her life in Pune and Mumbai. She studied at Cathedral and John Connon School. She left India at 14, and she and her mother lived in England for a year before moving to the United States, where she studied creative writing at Bennington College, Hollins University, and Columbia University.
Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published in 1998 and endured recognition from such outstanding figures as Salman Rushdie. It won the Betty Trask Award, a prize given by the Society of Authors for best new novels by citizens of the Commonwealth of Nations under the age of 35.
Her second book, The Inheritance of Loss, (2006) was extensively applauded by critics throughout Asia, Europe and the United States. It won the 2006 Man Booker Prize, as well as the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award.
In August 2008, Desai was a guest on Private Passions, the biographical music discussion program hosted by Michael Berkeley on BBC Radio 3. In May 2007 she was the featured author at the inaugural Asia House Festival of Cold Literature.
She was awarded a 2013 Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.
NOTABLE WORKS :
- HULLABALOO IN THE GUAVA ORCHARD
- THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS
- NAMITA GOKHALE
Namita Gokhale is a writer, publisher, and festival director. She is the author of nineteen works of fiction and non-fiction. Her applauded premiere novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion, was published in 1984. Her fresh-mint novel Jaipur Journals, published in January 2020, is set against the backdrop of the springtly Jaipur Literature Festival, of which Gokhale is a founder-director. She is also the author of Himalayan Love Story, The Book of Shadows, Shakuntala: The Play of Memory and Lost in Time: Ghatotkacha and the Game of Illusions amongst others. Gokhale also edited The Himalayan Arc: Journeys East of South-east, which crisps on an influential yet often under-reported part of the Himalayan belt. The contemporary Things to Leave Behind, the third in her Himalayan trilogy, had been outlined as her most aspiring novel yet.
Gokhale was communicated the Centenary National Award for Literature by the Assam Sahitya Sabha in Guwahati in 2017 “for her literary contributions as well as her service to the nation in reinforcing and disporting literary talents and fabricating a literary territory in the country”. She won the Sushila Devi Literature Award for her novel Things to Leave Behind in January 2019. Things to Leave Behind also received the Best Fiction (English) Jury Award at the Valley of Words International Literature Festival 2017 and was on the long list for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award.
NOTABLE WORKS :
- BETRAYED BY HOPE
- JAIPUR JOURNALS
- DOUBLE BILL : PRIYA AND PARO
- THINGS TO LEAVE BEHIND
- THE BOOK OF SHADOWS
- A HIMALAYAN LOVE STORY
- MEGHNA PANT
Meghna Pant is a multifold award-winning author, feminist, speaker, journalist, and columnist.
Known as one of India’s best writers, Pant’s books have been published to analytical and commercialized applaud. Her books comprise ONE & A HALF WIFE (2012, Westland), HAPPY BIRTHDAY (2013, Random House), THE TROUBLE WITH WOMEN (2016, Juggernaut), and the latest FEMINIST RANI (2018, Penguin Random House). Her debut assemblage of short stories HAPPY BIRTHDAY was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Award (2014), the world’s biggest short story prize. ONE & A HALF WIFE – her debut novel –won the national Muse India Young Writer Award (2013) and was shortlisted for several other awards, incorporated the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. She’s won the Bharat Nirman Award (2017) and the FON South Asia Short Story Award (2016), and been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2018).
She has two forthcoming books: HOW TO GET PUBLISHED (Bloomsbury) and HOLY 100 (Rupa).
Her short stories have been published in over a dozen international literary magazines, encompassing Avatar Review, Wasafari, Eclectica, The Indian Quarterly and QLRS, as well as in diverse collectanea incorporating Namita Gokhale’s THE HIMALAYAN ARC, where her story Boongthing was critically praised by The Hindu, Telegraph, Business Standard and Hindustan Times. In 2013 Pant abbreviated the world’s longest epic, The Mahabharata, into one hundred tweets that The Guardian assessed as “wonderfully descriptive and paced”.
Her articles have been published in the Times of India, Hindustan Times, DNA, MidDay, The Asian Age, Mumbai Mirror, Tehelka, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Verve, Cosmopolitan, Grazia, Man’s World, Little India, South Asian Times, India Today, Scroll, Firstpost, The Huffington Post, DailyO and BuzzFeed, among others
Pant is an emphatic feminist and advocate of gender equality. She curates a popular monthly panel discourse on feminism in Mumbai called ‘Feminist Rani’, and interviews India’s prime outlook makers and switch leaders from Shobhaa De to Chanda Kochhar to Deepa Malik to Kalki Koechlin on online shows like She’s The Boss (Firstpost), First Lady (Firstpost), and Get Real (SheThePeople.TV). She has articulated out against domestic violence in her TEDx talks.
Pant is also known for having condensed the world’s longest epic, The Mahabharata, into one hundred tweets that The Guardian (UK) quoted as ‘wonderfully descriptive and paced’.
Pant has been invited as a speaker for many of the nation’s biggest literary festivals and conferences, encompassing TEDx, Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Jaipur Literature Festival, Dehradun Literature Festival, Times Lit Fest (Delhi & Mumbai), Think Literature, Kumaon Lit Fest, Litomania, Young Makers Conclave, Chandigarh Literati, Odisha Literary Festival, Hyderabad Literary Festival, Mood Indigo, TISS Literature Festival, Cuttack Lit Fest, Pune International Literary Festival,LitOFest, Festivelle, Global Shapers Community, Lucknow Literature Carnival, Women Writers Fest, Litomania, #RiseWithTwitter, Rotary Club, The Feminist Conference (UN Women), PEN and She Leads India.
NOTABLE WORKS :
- One and a half wife
- Happy birthday
- The trouble with women
- The terrible, horrible very bad good news
- PREETI SHENOY
Preeti Shenoy, among the top five towering selling authors in India, is also on the Forbes long-list of the most noteworthy celebrities in India. Her work has been interpreted to many languages.
India Today has styled her as being unique and distinctive for being the only woman in the best-selling alliance. She has been accorded the ‘Indian of the Year’ award for 2017 by Brands Academy for her benefactions to Literature. She has also secured the Academia award for Business Excellence by the New Delhi Institute of Management. She has given talks in many pre-eminent educational institutions such as IITs and IIMs and corporate organizations like Infosys, Accenture and KPMG. She is also an artist detailed in portraiture and exemplified journaling.
Her short stories and poetry have been published in myriad magazines such as Verve and Conde Nast.
She has a well-liked blog and also writes a weekly column in The Financial Chronicle. She has an immense online following. Her other fascinations are photography, yoga and travel.
NOTABLE WORKS :
- THE RULE BREAKERS
- A HUNDRED LITTLE FLAMES
- IT’S ALL IN THE PLANETS
- IT HAPPENS FOR A REASON
- LIFE IS WHAT YOU MAKE IT
- WAKE UP LIFE CALLING
- SUDHA MURTHY
Sudha Murty is the chairperson of the Infosys Foundation in India. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. She initiated her career as a development engineer with TELCO (now Tata Motors) and has also instructed computer science at Bangalore University.
Sudha Murty is a bounteous writer in Kannada and English. She is a columnist for English and Kannada dailies with more than 30 books and 200 entitles to her acclaim – incorporating non-fiction, travelogues, novels, technical books, and memoirs. Her books have been interpreted into all prime Indian languages. She has been honoured with awards for her literary and philanthropic efforts.
She has also received the Padma Shri Award from the Government of India as well as seven honorary doctorates from profuse universities in India.
NOTABLE WORKS :
- GRANDMA’S BAG OF STORIES
- THE MOTHER I KNEW
- THREE THOUSAND STITCHES
- DOLLAR BAHU
- THE OLD MAN AND HIS GOD
- HOUSE OF CARDS
- ANITA DESAI
Anita Desai, is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been the finalist for the Booker Prize three times. She grabbed a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters. She secured the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea.
Desai published her debut novel, Cry The Peacock, in 1963. In 1958 she collaborated with P. Lal and established the publishing firm Writers Workshop. She contemplates Clear Light of Day (1980) her most autobiographical work as it is set during her coming of age and also in the same neighborhood in which she grew up.
In 1984, she published In Custody – about an Urdu poet in his dwindling days – which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1993, she became a creative writing teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The 1999 Booker Prize finalist novel Fasting, Feasting enlarged her popularity. Her novel The Zigzag Way, set in 20th-century Mexico, materialized in 2004 and her neoteric assemblage of short stories, The Artist of Disappearance, was published in 2011.
Desai has instructed at Mount Holyoke College, Baruch College, and Smith College. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and of Girton College, Cambridge (to which she dedicated Baumgartner’s Bombay).
NOTABLE WORKS :
- CLEAR LIGHT OF DAY
- IN CUSTODY
- THE ARTIST OF DISAPPEARENCE
- FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN
- THE ZIGZAG WAY
- THE VILLAGE BY THE SEA
Accordingly, having a subsequent consideration on these authors, can dispense you with a pleasant vibe of indulging yourselves in the writing land.
