Manjula Padmanabhan is an artist, illustrator, cartoonist, playwright
and novelist. She has illustrated 21 children's books, and has had
a longrunning cartoon strip, Suki, in the Sunday Observer and later
the Pioneers. Her play, Harvest, was selected from 1470 entries in
76 countries for the Onassis Prize in 1997.
Alienation and marginalization play a large role in her
books. Harvest is a futuristic play about the sale of body
parts
and exploitative relations between developed and developing countries.
It is being filmed by Govind Nihalani. Her short stories are marked
by a wry sense of humour.
Padmanabhan's latest book, Getting There is a
semi-autobiographical novel about a young woman illustrator in Bombay.
She describes it as being
"based loosely on events in the author's life
between 1977 and '78. Almost none of it is
entirely factual,
but as a whole it is more
true than false"
Her cartoon strip, Suki, is also being published as a book in 2001,
and her etchings are featured in their own exhibition in Delhi.
Manjula Padmanabhan was born in Delhi, grew up in Sweden, Pakistan
and Thailand, and now lives in Delhi.
- About Manjula Padmanabhan
- Review
of This is Suki in India Today.
- We're
so Sari. Kai Friese writes about Indian expat novelists in Village
Voice, and recommends Manjula Padmanabhan's Getting There.
- Writing available online
- Saving
Grace. Rediff columns.
- Marginalia.
Column in The Week.
Bibliography
- Kleptomania
Penguin India (2003)
- In this verstile collection of stories from the award-winning author of Harvest, the reader will encounter a range of themes, from murder mystery to science fiction. The author's vision of a post-apocalypse future is dark, but rendered with a rich vein of irony and humor that allows us to roller-coast with her into a world where air and water and the earth itself take on new shades of meaning.
Then there are the here-and-now stories of bodies turning up in backyards, of love betrayed and sexuality discovered, of bitter awakenings and upbeat endings. Intelligent, opinionted, playful, this is a collection that defies limitations of time, space and imagination to conjure up new morality tales of our time.
- Sawnet Review by Priyanka Gill
- Getting There
Picador. (2000)
- A semi-autobiographical novel.
- Sawnet Review by Kalyani Deshpande
- She
walks the earth but does not quite touch the sky. Review in The
Indian Express.
- Hot death, cold soup
Kali for Women, New Delhi (1996)
- 12 short stories.
- Harvest
(1989)
-
- Review
of Harvest
