Anjana Basu is a novelist, poet, essayist and scriptwriter who was born in Allahabad, and schooled for a time in the UK. She has published seven novels and two books of poetry. The BBC has broadcast one of her short stories. She was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in Scotland in 2004 where she worked on her second novel, Black Tongue (2007). She began writing for children in 2010 when the publisher, Roli, brought out Chinku and the Wolfboy. Her Jim Corbett series for The Energy and Resources Institute dealing with big cat conservation for children began in 2013 with In the Shadow of the Leaves, and added to the list were Leopard in the Laboratory in 2016, and Eighteen Tides and a Tiger in 2017. She has worked on the dialogues for the film The Last Lear (director Rituparno Ghosh). Anjana lives and works as an advertising consultant in Calcutta.
Harish C. Mehta holds a PhD (McMaster University, Canada) in the history of American foreign relations and Southeast Asia. Author of three books on Cambodian politics and media, his articles on Vietnamese diplomacy have appeared in the American journals Diplomatic History, Peace and Change, The Historian, and History Compass, and his review articles have appeared in H-Diplo. He has taught history at McMaster, the University of Toronto, and Trent University. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Calcutta Journal of Global Affairs. Harish is a former Senior Indochina Correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore, and he was based in Singapore and Thailand for seventeen years, covering both Southeast Asia and Asean.
Julie Banerjee Mehta holds a Master’s degree and PhD in English Literature and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, and also an MA from Jadavpur University, Calcutta. A specialist in world literature and cultural studies, she currently teaches postcolonial literature at Loreto College, Calcutta, and has taught at the University of Toronto and York University in Canada. She is the author of Dance of Life: The Mythology, History, and Politics of Cambodian Culture, and co-author of Hun Sen: Strongman of Cambodia (with Harish C. Mehta). She has been researching Cambodian history and culture since the early 1990s, and has visited Cambodia over the last three decades to conduct archival research and interviews with survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide.
Kamaran M. K. Mondol is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Chandidas Mahavidyalaya, the University of Burdwan in West Bengal. He holds an MPhil and a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His articles have appeared in the International Studies Quarterly, Inquest: A Journal of Social Science and Humanities, and The Milli Gazette Online, and his book chapters have been published in Terrorism and Human Rights in the Globalizing World: Experience in Indian Context; Thoughts on Liberal Arts and Popular Culture; Globalisation, Environment and Sustainable Development: Indian Perspective; Development and Politics in India; and State, Nation and Multiculturalism: Problems in Perspectives.
John Ranjan Mukherjee (Lt.-Gen., Retd., PVSM, AVSM, VSM) is a former General Officer Commanding Kashmir (15 Corps), and Chief of Staff, Eastern Command. He is the author of An Insider’s Experience of Insurgency in India’s North East, and The Indomitable Rhino Warriors of India’s North East: History of the Assam Regiment. He belongs to the Assam Regiment, which recruits men only from the North Eastern region of India. He has served twenty-six years in the North East, and has lived with the men of his regiment and people from the region almost all his life, and is married to a Mizo lady.
Krishnan Srinivasan is a former Foreign Secretary in India’s Ministry of External Affairs, and later served as Deputy Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford University, and has held fellowships at Cambridge, Leiden, Uppsala, and Calcutta. His non-fiction books include Old Europe, New Asia: Strategies, Challenges, Responses; Europe in Emerging Asia; Diplomatic Channels; Towards the New Horizon: World Order in the 21st Century; The Jamdani Revolution: Politics, Personalities and Civil Society in Bangladesh; The Rise, Decline and Future of the British Commonwealth; and Tricks of the Trade. His novels are: Ambassador Marco's Indian Instincts; The Invisible African; Guesswork; The Ugly Ambassador; and The Eccentric Effect.
Toh Han Shih holds a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology, and a doctorate in physics from Oxford University. He also has a Master’s in Southeast Asian Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and has completed a part-time Master’s of Economics at Hong Kong University. Han Shih is a Singapore-born writer with twenty years of experience in business journalism. He lives in Hong Kong. In December 2016, he published the book, Is China an Empire? Previously, he worked as a journalist at the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong for nearly ten years. From 2007 to 2008, he worked at Kroll, and in the late 1990s, he was a reporter at the Business Times in Singapore.