She is a poet and artist, awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2014. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she has been Poet in Residence at Cambridge University Library and worked on projects across art forms in Leeds, Newcastle and Hull, as well as the Archives of St Paul’s Cathedral. Her six collections include Over the Moon and the latest, Luck is the Hook, and her poems have been broadcast widely on BBC Radio 3 and 4 as well as the BBC World Service. She also scripts and directs video films, and has had eleven solo exhibitions of drawings.
‘Reading her, one feels that were there to be a World Laureate, Imtiaz Dharker would be the only candidate.
Whether she writes of exile, childhood, politics or grief, her clear-eyed attention brings each subject dazzlingly into focus. She makes it look easy, this clarity and economy, but it is her deft phrasing, wit and grace that create this immediacy.’
-Carol Ann Duffy
Festival Footnote: She has just turned down the UK Poet Laureate post in order to focus on poetry.
Mark Tully was born in Kolkata in 1935 and educated in India and England. He joined the BBC in 1964 and moved to india the following year. He was the BBC’s Delhi correspondent for over twenty years. Since resigning from the BBC, he has been a freelance journalist and broadcaster based in New Delhi. He continues to write and present ‘Something Understood’, a popular radio programme on BBC Radio 4. His books include ‘Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle’, ‘Raj to Rajiv’, ‘No Full Stops in India’, ‘India in Slow Motion’, ‘Indian’s Neverending Journey’, ‘Non-Stop India’ and two collections of short stories ‘Heart of India’and the recently published ‘Upcountry Tales’.
Zareer Masani is the author of Macaulay: Britain’s Liberal Imperialist (The Bodley Head, 2013). He has an Oxford history doctorate and is the author of three other historical books: Indira Gandhi: A Biography, Indian Tales of the Raj and India from Raj to Rajiv (with Mark Tully). He has also written a widely acclaimed family memoir, And All Is Said: Memoir of a Home Divided
(Penguin, 2013).
Zareer spent two decades as a producer for BBC Radio 4 and is now a freelance historian, journalist and broadcaster. His particular areas of interest include the British Raj in India.
Rahul Singh has been a writer, journalist and editor of Readers Digest, Indian Express, Sunday Observer.
He has penned, among other books, an engaging biography of his father Khushwant Singh, In The Name of the Father, which was launched by Amitabh Bachchan.
He has been advisor to World Literacy Canada, President of Satyagyan Foundation, India, President of the media awards committee at the Population Institute Washington. He is presently on the board of Delhi Public Schools and a Washington based
non-profit, DKT.
Rahul studied in about 11 schools as his father was posted all over during his years in the foreign service. He graduated in History from Kings College, Cambridge.
Niloufer Bilimoria is a Founder Director of KSLF London. The Festival began as a labor of love to propagate the values and ideals of Khushwant Singh. Which are needed in today’s world of strife and lives full of care, where we have no time to stand and stare.Her background with a leading international hotel chain and the largest selling English daily newspaper in the world prepares her to take on this challenge of bringing together leading minds on a common platform to inspire, challenge, learn and unlearn. Inspired by Alvin Toffler, “For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday”
