Manjula Padmanabhan


Manjula Padmanabhan is an Indian playwright, journalist, comic strip artist, and children's book author.

Early life

Born in Delhi to a diplomat family in 1953, she went to boarding school in her teenage years. After college she began working in publishing and media-related fields.

Career & works

She won the Greek Onassis Award for her play Harvest. An award-winning film Deham was made by Govind Nihalani based on the play.
She has written one more powerful play, Lights Out!, Hidden Fires is a series of monologues. The Artist's Model and Sextet are her other works..
She has also authored a collection of short stories, called Kleptomania. Her most recent book, published in 2008, is Escape.
Apart from writing newspaper columns she created comic strips. She created Suki, an Indian comic character, which was serialized as a strip in the The Sunday Observer. Before 1997 she was better known as cartoonist and had a daily cartoon strip in The Pioneer newspaper.

As playwright