We are delighted and honoured to have Lady Kishwar Desai as our Ambassador.
Lady Kishwar Desai, is an author, playwright and a columnist. She started her career as a print journalist and worked as a political reporter, moving on to television and broadcast media after a while, where she worked for over two decades. Her first novel, Witness the Night, won the Costa Book Award in 2010 for Best First Novel and has been translated into over 25 languages. It was also shortlisted for the Author’s Club First Novel Award and longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize.
Kishwar is a Trustee with the Gandhi Statue Memorial Trust, in which she helped to set up the statue of Mahatma Gandhi at Westminster Square in London. While the government allotted the space, the charity, chaired by Lord Meghnad Desai, had to raise the money for it. The statue was inaugurated by the then Prime Minister David Cameron and the Finance Minister of India, Arun Jaitley, in 2015. Later in 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi also paid his respects at the Gandhi Statue on his visit to the UK, accompanied by the members of the Gandhi Statue Memorial Trust and Prime Minister Cameron.
In early 2015, Lady Kishwar Desai, was instrumental in setting up The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust with the primary goal of setting up the world’s first museum and memorial on the Partition, one of the most defining events in the history of the Indian subcontinent. It remains till date the largest mass migration in human history.
As a novelist, her last novel The Sea of Innocence was published in 2014 in India as well as in UK and Australia, and was widely discussed as it dealt with the difficult issue of gang rape. Her critically acclaimed novel, Origins of Love, was published in June 2012. Kishwar also has a biography, Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, to her credit.
Kishwar Desai has written four books. She currently writes columns for The Week magazine, The Asian Age and The Tribune newspapers and lives between London, Goa and Delhi.