Silverware On The Indian Bookshelf

Ankhi Mukherjee is Professor of English and World Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow in English at Wadham College. Her teaching and research specialisms lie in Victorian Literature, Culture, Postcolonial Studies and Intellectual History. She is currently teaching at the Institute of World Literature at Harvard University.

Daisy Rockwell is an artist, writer and Hindi-Urdu translator living in Vermont. Her translations have garnered several notable honours including the International Booker Prize for translation Tomb of Sand, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the MLA Aldo and Jean Scaglione Prize for Translation of a Literary Work and the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation. Alice Sees Ghosts is her new novel. Her forthcoming books include Mixed Metaphors, her collection of creative non-fiction and poems, and her memoir, Our Friend, Art.

Kanishka Gupta is a literary agent based in New Delhi and represents a glittering list of award-winning authors. They include Daisy Rockwell, winner of the International Booker Prize in 2022 for her translation of Gitanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand. He represents other acclaimed authors such as Avni Doshi and Jerry Pinto and has also worked closely with Shehan Karunatilaka, the winner of the 2022 Man Booker Prize. He founded Writer’s Side in 2010 which has evolved into the largest and most influential literary agency and consultancy in South Asia. Dedicated to nurturing literary talent, it now represents over 1,000 writers.

Upamanyu Chatterjee is the author of English, August: An Indian Story (1988), The Last Burden (1993), The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000), Weight Loss (2006), Way to Go (2011), Fairy Tales at Fifty (2014) and Villainy (2022), all novels; The Revenge of the Non-vegetarian (2018), a novella and The Assassination of Indira Gandhi (2019), a collection of long stories. In 2000, he won the Sahitya Akademi Award and in 2008, he was awarded the Order of Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government for his contribution to literature. His book, Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life, which won the JCB Prize for Literature in 2024, is a study of the extraordinary experiences of an ordinary man and of both the majesty and the banality of the spiritual path. This novel marks a new phase in the literary journey of one of India’s finest and most consistently original writers. His latest collection of novellas, The Hush of the Uncaring Sea, was published in 2025.

Sandip Roy is a writer, columnist and podcaster currently living in Kolkata. He is a columnist for Mint Lounge and The Hindu and hosts The Sandip Roy Show on Indian Express. His weekly audio dispatches from Kolkata have been airing on public radio KALW in San Francisco since 2012 and has crossed over 500 episodes by now. His work has appeared in publications like the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, BBC, NPR, Conde Nast Traveler, Economic Times, First Post and The Times of India and anthologies like Contours of the Heart, Out!, Cat People and House Spirit. His award-winning first novel was Don’t Let Him Know and his new book is Chapal Rani, The Last Queen of Bengal – The Life and Times of a Female Impersonator.