TOI Bookmark

Natasha Walter is a British feminist writer and a human rights activist and the founder of the charity Women for Refugee Women, which works with women who have sought asylum in the UK. Walter has also worked as a journalist for The Guardian and The Observer and taught as a visiting professor of Women Rights at Cambridge University and junior teaching fellow at the Department of Visual and Environm...

Omair Ahmad is the author of ‘Encounters’, ‘The Storyteller's Tale’, ‘Tall Tales by a Small Dog’, ‘The Kingdom at the Centre of the World: Journeys Into Bhutan’ and ‘Jimmy, The Terrorist’, which won the Crossword Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. He is also a prominent columnist and a political and social commentator. In this conversation, he discusses his...

Samanth Subramanian is a writer and journalist based in London, where he is the acting managing editor of Equator . Subramanian also writes for the New Yorker , the New York Times Magazine and The Guardian , among other publications. His last book A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane was one of the New York Times top 100 books of 2020. His second book...

Jenny Niven is CEO and director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. She was founder and director of Push the Boat Out, a festival of poetry, spoken word and language; head of literature, publishing and languages at Creative Scotland, and executive producer of the Edinburgh International Cultural Summit. She has been on the founding board of the Stella Prize for Australian Women's Wri...

Neil D’Silva is a prolific author but best known for his horror writing, including popular titles like Maya's New Husband, Yakshini Sapna's Bad Connection, Dev Putra, and Ghost Whispers . D’Silva has played a key role in shaping India’s horror literature landscape, having served as president of the Indian chapter of the Horror Writers association and jury chair in the short stories categor...

Mahmood Farooqui is an acclaimed writer and performer known for reviving Dastangoi, the lost art of Urdu storytelling. He has received the Ramnath Goenka Award for Besieged: Voices From Delhi-1857. He has been visiting fellow at the University of Michigan and University of California, Berkeley. Mahmood has co-directed Peepli Live and produced The Great Shamsuddin Family.  In this conversation, he...

Professor Munis D Faruqui is a historian in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Princes of the Mughal Empire 1504-1790 and the co-editor of several influential volumes including Expanding Frontiers in South Asian and World History and Religious Interactions in Mughal India. In this episode of TOI Bookmark, Faruqui discu...

Tahmima Anam is the author of the Bengal trilogy: 'A Golden Age', 'The Good Muslim' and 'The Bones of Grace'. She is the recipient of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book and the O Henry Award. 'Garments' was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. She was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists and is a fellow of the Ro...

Born in 2003, Nelio Biedermann grew up near on Lake Zurich. His grandparents fled to Switzerland in the 1950s. Biedermann, whose paternal family is descended from Hungarian nobility, studied German and Film Studies at the University of Zurich. Biedermann’s novel Lazar , originally published in German, sold more than 200,000 copies in the first four months and spent 29 weeks on the German bestselle...

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University with a secondary appointment as professor at the Yale School of the Environment. He serves as Director of the Macmillan Centre for International and Area Studies and Yale's Vice Provost for International Affairs. He has received the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities, a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, and the 2025 Toynb...

Tayari Jones is an American author best known for An American Marriage , which won the Women’s Prize for fiction in 2019. The novel won multiple other awards and was on Barack Obama’s summer reading list. Jones, who is the recipient of many writing awards, is also a professor of Creative Writing at Emory University. She is listed in the Times 100 Influential People of 2026. In this episode of TOI...

Muddasir Ramzan is an academic and writer from Kashmir. Ramzan, who holds a doctorate in English from Aligarh Muslim University, focuses his scholarly work on contemporary Muslim writing and 20th and 21st century literature, with special emphasis on South Asian literature, Kashmir studies, and narratives of migration. He engages critically with post-colonial and post-modern theory as well as Islam...

Tanul Thakur is an award-winning journalist and film critic. In 2015, he won the National Film Award for Best Film Critic, the youngest to receive the honour. Many media outlets have interviewed him on cinema, culture and the H1B programme. In this conversation, he discusses his debut book, 'Wild Wild East'. 

Karan Mahajan is an Indian-American novelist, essayist, and critic. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs , was named one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. It won the Muse India Young Writer Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the crossword Book Award, and the DSC Prize for South Asian literature, among other honors. His debut novel, F...

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...