Archives: Authors

Vanessa Barros was born in Paris to a Portuguese actor and a French teacher. She was raised in Portugal and France. She started travelling by herself at the age of sixteen in the US and throughout Brazil the following year. She never stopped exploring the world ever since.
She graduated with a master of science in Management from ESSEC Business School and embarked on an international advertising career for the next twenty years. She ran local, regional and global accounts at Saatchi & Saatchi, McCann-Erickson, Havas, BETC and Ogilvy, working for prestigious clients including Reckitt Benckiser, Nina Ricci, Procter & Gamble, Lolita Lempicka, Danone, Kraft Foods Peugeot and Unilever. She worked on four continents (north America, south America, Europe, Central Asia and Asia), speaks four languages fluently and has gained solid experience in multi-cultural management, team leadership, operations and business development.
Vanessa completed her PhD in cultural intelligence with the Center for Leadership and Cultural Intelligence at the Nanyang Business School (Nanyang Technological University) under the supervision of Professor Ang Soon. Her research focuses on the strategies adopted by senior international executives to manage intercultural conflicts effectively.
Vanessa Barros shares her time between research, education and consulting around the world whilst raising her three sons.

Aubrey Menard lived in Mongolia as a Luce Scholar from 2015 to 2016. She’s worked on democracy and governance issues in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, Central America, and the United States.
Aubrey is an expert on political transitions, elections, and democracy. She’s been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Politico, the South China Morning Post, and more. Aubrey earned an MPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor’s degree from Smith College. She is a Critical Language Scholar (Russian) and a Truman National Security Project Fellow. Young Mongols is her first book.
Learn more at aubreymenard.com.

Alonso Salazar was the Mayor of Medellín for the period 2008-2011. His career as
a writer emerged from the social and institutional crisis posed by narcotrafficking
in Columbia. He won the Planeta de Periodismo Prize (2003) with Profeta en el
desierto. His first book Born to Die, has become a classic.

Leila S. Chudori is Indonesia’s most prominent and outspoken female journalist.
She worked at TEMPO News Magazine from 1989 to 2018. She is also considered
one of Indonesia’s boldest story-tellers and is a well-known figure in the
Indonesian literary scene. She is the author of several anthologies of short stories,
three novels, TV and film scripts. Her novel Pulang (Home) was translated into
English, French, German, Dutch and Italian. Today, Leila lives in Jakarta with her
daughter, Rain Chudori-Soerjoatmodjo.

Payal Kapadia grew up reading everything she could get her hands on; writing poetry for a captive audience (her family); and presiding over a club called the Stupendous Six, which did a stupendous amount of nothing.
Her critically acclaimed debut, Wisha Wozzariter, won the Crossword Book Award 2013 for Children’s Writing. Payal writes full-time now (if you don’t count the time spent getting her two daughters to eat faster, please). She has authored Colonel Hathi Loses His Brigade, Puffin Lives: B.R. Ambedkar and Washed Up!, a reader for Australian, British and American schools.
Payal has travelled to the Jaipur Literature Festival, Bookaroo, the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival and the Kala Ghoda Festival. She reads to children at schools all over the country where she refuses to be taken seriously.
Find her at www.payalkapadia.com or www.horridhigh.com.

Dr Darryl Whetter is the inaugural director of the first taught Creative Writing master’s degree in Singapore and Southeast Asia (at LASALLE College of the Arts). He is the author of four books of fiction and two poetry collections. His other novels include the bicycle odyssey The Push & the Pull and the multi-generational smuggling epic Keeping Things Whole. In his native Canada, he regularly reviewed books on national CBC Radio, and nearly 100 of his reviews have appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Montreal Gazette, The National Post, Detroit’s Metro Times, etc. His essays on contemporary literature and Creative Writing pedagogy have been published by Oxford University Press, Routledge, the National Poetry Foundation (USA), Les Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, etc. He can be reached at www.darrylwhetter.ca.

Tim I Gurung joined the British Gurkhas at the tender age of seventeen as his grandfathers and uncles did before him. He carried on for the next thirteen years and eventually retired in 1993 as an Army Corporal, after which he became a businessman. Before his fiftieth birthday, he made a life-changing decision and became a full-time writer and has since published twelve novels.

Venita Coelho works with words, images and paint. She is the author of seven
published books with three more scheduled for publication in 2019. She has
written an award-winning trilogy published by Hachette India. Tiger by the Tail
won a special jury mention at the Neev Awards 2018. Dead as a Dodo won
The Hindu Goodbooks award for best Children’s Fiction in 2016. Monkey See
Monkey Do was nominated for The Hindu Goodbooks award for best Children’s
fiction in 2017. Boy No. 32 published by Scholastic, was nominated for the
Neev Awards 2018. Her book of feminist ghost stories, The Washer of the Dead,
published by Zubaan/Penguin was shortlisted for The Frank O’Connor Awards.

Israeli author Eshkar Erblich-Brifman has published thirty-four books. She resides with her family on the outskirts of the Carmel Forest, surrounded by the nature that inspires the fantastic worlds of her books containing spectacular views and fascinating magical creatures. Her two flagship series, Winter Blue, Fairy-Child, and Anis, Beginner Witch, have won the hearts and ignited the imaginations of hundreds of thousands of readers, and have become essential parts of Israeli children’s and young adult literature.

R. Parthasarathy is professor emeritus of English at Skidmore College. He is the
editor and translator of The Tale of an Anklet: An Epic of South India (Columbia,
1993).