TOI Bookmark

Assa Doron is a professor of Anthropology and South Asia at Australian National University.  He is the author and co-author of several books, including ‘Life on the Ganga’, ‘The Great Indian Phone Book’, and ‘Waste of a Nation’. Alex Broom is academic director at Australian Research Council, professor of Sociology, and director of the Sydney Centre for Healthy Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Social...

Douglas Stuart is a New York-based Scottish author whose work explores themes of class and sexuality. He rose to international acclaim with his debut, 'Shuggie Bain', which won the 2020 Booker Prize and swept the British Book Awards. It was followed by the number one Sunday Times bestseller, 'Young Mungo', in 2022. His shorter works and essays have been featured in The New Yorker a...

Babell is a translation-focused literary festival set to take place in the city or Porto, Italy from 24-29 June. It invites writers who work across languages and cultures, and their Italian translators; the festival promotes translations between different art forms, organises translation workshops, prizes, and residences, and publishes new work. In this episode of TOI Bookmark, authors and members...

Mohammed Hanif graduated from the Pakistan Air Force Academy as a pilot officer, but left to pursue a career in journalism. His first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for best first novel. His second novel, Our Lady Of Alice Bhatti, was shortlisted for the 2012 Wellcome...

Lucy Steeds is an English author whose debut novel The Artist was a Sunday Times bestseller. It was long listed for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2025, and won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Award and the Waterstones Book of the Year Award. Steeds has synaesthesia which she leans on as inspiration when translating images into words. She is a graduate of both the Faber Academy and the London Lib...

Yang Shuangzi and translator Lin King discuss the craft and politics behind 'Taiwan Travelogue', newly awarded the 2026 International Booker Prize, and describe a book designed to feel like both romance and post-colonial critique

Kavery Nambisan is a surgeon and a novelist from Karnataka. She has won the Tata Excellence Award for her work in tea plantations in Tamil Nadu. She has written articles and essays on medical and literary issues. Her novels include ‘The Scent of Pepper’, ‘The Story That Must Not Be Told’ and ‘A Town Like Ours’. Her two non-fiction books are ‘A Luxury Called Health’ and ‘Cherry Red, Cherry Black’. ...

Daniyal Mueenuddin is a Pakistani-American author whose stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and the Best American Short Stories, 2008, selected by Salman Rushdie. His collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. A graduate of Dartsmouth College and Yale Law School, Mueenuddin practiced law in New York for a number of years...

Rabih Alameddine is the author of ‘An Unnecessary Woman’, ‘The Hakawati’ and ‘I, The Divine’, in addition to many others. Among his accolades are the 2022 Penn Faulkner Award for Fiction and the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction. In this conversation, he discusses his latest book, ‘The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)’.

Anand Neelkantan is an Indian novelist, columnist, screenwriter and public speaker who is known for his reinterpretation of mythological narratives from alternative perspectives. Neelkantan is known for integrating historical, mythological and contemporary thematic elements like artificial intelligence. He has authored 16 novels, including the Asura and Bahubali trilogies, two non fiction books, a...

Robert MacFarlane is the bestselling author of a long list of titles, including include Underland, Landmarks, The Gifts of Reading, The Old Ways, The Wild Places, and Mountains of the Mind . His critically acclaimed works have been translated into more than 30 languages and widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E...

Ravikant Kisana is an academic and the author of ‘Meet the Savarnas’. He also podcasts and performs live under the moniker Buffalo Intellectual.

Mirza Waheed is a novelist and essayist born and raised in Kashmir and living in London. His debut novel, ‘The Collaborator’, was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award and the Shakti Bhatt Prize and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. His second novel, ‘The Book of Gold Leaves’, was shortlisted for the DSC Prize and longlisted for the Folio Prize. His third novel, ‘Tell Her Everyt...

Anne is a Norwegian urban developer, curator and cultural producer with an international profile in art in public space. With more than 20 years' experience across art,  architecture and civic infrastructure,  she specialises in large-scale site specific projects rooted in place, time and community

Daniel Rensch is an international chess master, published author and chief chess officer at chess.com, the leading platform for playing and learning chess. In this conversation, he discusses his memoir, ‘Dark Squares’.

Nussaibah Younis is a peace building practitioner and a globally recognized expert on contemporary Iraq. Younis has advised the Iraqi government on proposed programs to de radicalize women affiliated with the ISIS. She was a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC where she directed the task force on the future of Iraq and offered strategic advice to US government agencies on Iraq...

David Szalay is the author of ‘Spring’, ‘The Innocent’, and ‘London and the Southeast’, for which he was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prizes. ‘All That Man Is’ got the Gordon Burn Prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In this conversation, he discusses his Booker Prize 2025 winning novel, ‘Flesh’. 

Amitav Ghosh is the critically acclaimed author of a widerange of fiction as well as non-fiction titles – including Shadow Lines , The Glass Palace , The Hungry Tide , The Great Derangement , Smoke and Ashes, and Wild Fictions . Ghosh’s works have been translated into more than 30 languages, and he has been felicitated with literary awards across the globe. In 2019, Ghosh was named one of the most...

Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 at CERN in Switzerland. Since then, he has been a tireless advocate for shared standards, open web access, and the power of individuals on the web. He was named in Time magazine's list of the most important people of the 20th century. He has been the recipient of several honorary degrees and awards, including the Seoul Peace Prize and the...

Maha Khan Phillips, born in Karachi, Pakistan, is the authorof Beautiful From This Angle, The Mystery of the Aagnee Ruby and The Curse of Mohenjodaro . Phillips is a multiple award winning financial journalist and editor who writes across a number of different journals and magazines. She lives in London with her family and frequently visits Pakistan where she has a keen interest in exploring archa...

Pallavi Aiyar is a foreign correspondent, columnist and author. She has spent over two decades reporting from China, Belgium, Japan, Indonesia and Spain. She's the author of eight books, including ‘Smoke and Mirrors’, ‘Punjabi Parmesan’ and ‘Babies and Bylines’. Her latest work is ‘Travels in the Other Place: Pursuing the Self in Eight Acts’. 

Deepa Anappara is the critically acclaimed author of Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line , a debut novel named one of the best of 2020 by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, The Guardian and NPR. Anappara is the winner of the 2021 Edgar Award for and shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature. She is a former journalist in India reporting on poverty, education and religious violence. Her...

Anuradha Roy is the author of five novels. Her first, ‘An Atlas of Impossible Longing’, was translated into 16 languages. ‘Sleeping on Jupiter’, her third novel, won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015. ‘All the Lives We Never Lived’ won the 2022 Sahitya Akademi Award and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. 'Called by the Hil...

Rudraneil Sengupta is an independent journalist based in Delhi who writes for various international and national media outlets, including the Times of India, the BBC. Sengupta has also worked on documentary films for Al Jazeera. He is the author of Enter the Dangal: Travels Through India's Wrestling Landscape - a non-fiction account that offers a look into India's wrestling culture. In thi...

Megha Majumdar's new novel, 'A Guardian and a Thief’, is an Oprah's Book Club selection, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and on the longlist for the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal. Her first book, 'A Burning’, was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize and the Carnegie M...