• Deepa Bhasthi

  Winner of the International Booker Prize 2025 for translation of Heart Lamp along with Banu Mushtaq.

  Her cultural criticism, essays, columns and journalism have been published extensively in Indian and international publications, anthologies and art book projects. 

  We’ll talk about Indian Literature, translations, and how it feels to win an International Booker.

• Purnima Tammireddy

  Purnima Tammireddy is an Indian author, translator, and publisher working in Telugu and English.

  She is the author of the Telugu short-story collection Emotional Pregnancy. She was a Writer-in-Residence at the Sangam House International Writers Residency (2022).

  Her translation work includes Telugu translations of Manto’s Siya Hashiye and Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar. Her recent English translations include Volga’s On the Banks of the Pampa (HarperCollins) and The Fire of Defiance – Mallu Swarajyam, the memoir of the Telangana Armed Movement leader.

  In 2022, she founded Elami Publications, an independent Telugu publishing house. Earlier, in 2009, she co-founded pustakam.net, one of India’s earliest platforms for book reviews.

  A tech professional by training, she currently lives in Bengaluru. More about her work is available at purnimatammireddy.com.

• Dibakar Banerjee

  National Award-winning director of “Khosla ka Ghosla”, LSD, Byomkesh Bakshi, “Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye”, etc.

  He will be chatting with Shubhra Gupta, Indian Express Film Critic and author of two books. Shubhra also teaches this course on film appreciation at the Himalayan Writing Retreat.

  We’ll chat about film, culture (and what drives what), self-censoring and much else.
  

• Shubhra Gupta

  Shubhra Gupta, a senior columnist and acclaimed film critic at The Indian Express, boasts over 25 years
  of experience with her widely-read weekly review column.

  A prominent figure in India's film criticism scene, she frequently attends global film festivals and has served on national and international juries. She curates and conducts the hugely popular platform, The Indian Express Screen Film Club, in Delhi and Mumbai. She has been a member of the Central Board Of Film Certification ( CBFC).

  She is the recipient of the prestigious 2012 Ramnath Goenka award that celebrates the finest in Indian journalism.

  Shubhra has authored two books, '50 Films That Changed Bollywood 1995-2015' ( HarperCollins) and 'Irrfan: A Life In Movies' ( PanMacMillan), a comprehensive tribute to the late actor.

The Ghost in the Book – The Realities of Ghostwriting

We’ll talk about what ghostwriting means to readers and writers. Taking credit, Limitations, Ethics, etc. 

Panelists: 

• Narayani Basu
  
  Narayani Basu is a historian and foreign policy analyst. A graduate in history and Chinese foreign policy from the University of Delhi, she is the author of The United States and China: Competing Discourses of Regionalism in East Asia.

• Namrata
  
  Namrata is an experienced ghostwriter and editor with close to fifteen years in the field and over twenty-five ghostwritten titles. Known for her deep interviewing and editorial rigour, she specialises in transforming complex ideas into clear, compelling books.

• Binati Sheth

  Binati is a book writer and editor who loves languages, words, and books. She works as a ghostwriter, editor and writing guide for aspiring authors.

  She writes essays on the complex simplicity of the human experience (inexperience).
  She blogs about things she is learning and objects that interest her. 

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How India is changing:
Panel discussion 

Panelists:

• Santosh Desai
  Santosh Desai, author of the book Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India and the columnist behind the long-running column 'City City Bang Bang' in The Times of India, is regarded as one of India's leading social commentators.

• Vandana Vasudevan
  Vandana Vasudevan has written extensively for mainstream newspapers and has been a columnist for several years for Mint and DNA. Besides OTP Please, she is also the author of Urban Villager: Life In An Indian Satellite Town and Tough Customer.

Moderator: Chetan Mahajan

Panel Discussion:
विनोद कुमार शुक्ल जी का जीवन और उनकी रचनाएँ. (The Life and work of Vinod Kumar Shukla).

Vinod Kumar Shukla is a celebrated Hindi poet and novelist, known for works like Naukar ki Kameez and Deewar Mein Ek Khirkee Rehti Thi. He was the first from Chhattisgarh to receive the prestigious Jnanpith Award. He was also the recipient of PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature in 2025 and the Sahitya Akademi Award for the best Hindi work in 1999.

Panelists:

• Sara Rai

  Sara Rai is a fiction writer, editor, and translator working in Hindi, Urdu, and English.

  She has published four collections of short stories and a novel in Hindi. The German translation of her selected short fiction, Im Labyrinth (The Labyrinth), translated by Johanna Hahn, won the Coburg Rückert Prize (2019) and was nominated for the Weltempfänger Prize, Frankfurt (2020). She has translated five collections of short stories from Hindi into English, most recently Blue is like Blue by Vinod Kumar Shukla (with Arvind Krishna Mehrotra), which won the Atta Galatta Prize (2019) for fiction and the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award (2020). Her memoir Raw Umber won the Tata Literature Live Book of the Year Award (2023) for nonfiction. A selection of her short stories translated from Hindi, Other Skies, Other Stories, was published in 2025.

• Shashwat Shukla

  Shashwat Shukla is the son of the late renowned Hindi writer and Jnanpith Award recipient, Vinod Kumar Shukla (1937–2025). Vinod Kumar Shukla passed away at 89 on December 23, 2025, in Raipur, Chhattisgarh. Shashwat Shukla frequently highlighted his father's literary legacy, including a recent interaction with PM Modi regarding his father's health.

  Shashwat Shukla has spoken about his father's dedication to writing, describing it as "like breathing" for him.

• Shailesh Bharatvasi

  Shailesh Bharatwasi is the founder and editor-in-chief of Hind Yugm, one of the most popular publishing houses in Hindi. Through his conscientious editorial perspective, Bharatwasi has created a new tradition of Hindi reading and writing amongst the youth. He is also the progenitor of a new writing trend in Hindi known as Nayi Wali Hindi, through which Hind Yugm has worked to highlight and develop the literary and linguistic trends of the new century. Thanks to the ˜Nayi Wali Hindi” movement, he has brought millions of readers to the Hindi publishing hemisphere.

Rana Dasgupta
On his latest book, After Nations.

He will be chatting with Chetan Mahajan. In addition to his new book “After Nations”.  We’ll also talk about the business of awards, and how it feels to win multiple awards across genres, and what he plans to teach in the Himalayas this October (Know More about the course).

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The Notables

• Santanu Bhattacharya

  Santanu Bhattacharya is the author of two novels, One Small Voice and Deviants, and several works of short fiction.
  One Small Voice was an Observer Best Debut Novel for 2023, and was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award and the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize.
  Deviants won the Rainbow Award 2025 and BLF-Atta Galata Prize for Fiction Book of the Year 2025, and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Santanu is the recipient of the Desmond Elliott Prize Residency, the Mo Siewcharran Prize, the Life Writing Prize, and a London Writers’ Award. He grew up in India, and now lives in London.

• Ruchir Joshi

  Ruchir Joshi’s second novel, Great Eastern Hotel, was published in India and the UK in 2025.

  The novel won the 2025 Crossword Award for Best Literary Novel. Before this, Joshi has published The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, his first novel which came out to much acclaim in 2001 in India and the UK. Joshi's non-fiction work includes Poriborton! – An Election Diary, a road-book about the 2011 state elections in West Bengal. He is also the editor of Electric Feather, a collection of Indian erotic fiction. Over the years, Joshi has contributed to Granta, India Magazine, Man's World, Seminar, E-Flux, Witte de Witt Review, The Indian Quarterly and other journals. He has also been a columnist for The Telegraph, The Hindu, Economic Times, and other major Indian newspapers. As a filmmaker, he has directed documentaries and essay films, including the international award-winning Eleven Miles, Memories of Milk City and Tales from Planet Kolkata. Joshi lives in Calcutta.