Our prolific mentors include acclaimed writers and editors who will guide you as you work on your craft. For November 2024 retreat, we’ll be joined by Ushinor Majumdar.

Ushinor Majumdar is an award-winning investigative journalist and author. He has written two non-fiction books, both published by Penguin RandomHouse India, titled India’s Secret War: BSF and Nine Months to the Birth of Bangladesh (June 2023) and God of Sin: The Cult, Clout and Downfall of Asaram Bapu (December 2018). Ushinor has also worked as a staff writer for magazines, newspapers and websites such as Outlook, Tehelka, Confluence Media and Hindustan Times. As a freelancer, his reports have appeared in The Caravan, Mumbai Mirror, OCCRP, NewsLaundry, Times of India and amongst others, and he has been published in several languages in India and abroad. He has collaborated with multiple global media outlets on cross-border investigative stories.

Ushinor is interested in story-telling in all its forms. He has consulted with the BBC and other platforms as a development producer and researcher for documentaries. He worked with a production house where he created film pitch decks and series bibles for both fiction and dramatised non-fiction stories for screen. He has produced episodes for a podcast commissioned by Spotify and researched and written scripts for a limited-series podcast for an American agency. Ushinor has taught investigative reporting as visiting faculty at a private Indian university and at several workshops for working journalists. He is also an executive committee member of the media non-profit, Foundation for Media Professionals, which advocates for press freedom.

Previously, we have worked with:

Saloni Mital is Managing Editor, Penguin Random House India, with more than 13 years of experience in editing books, and writing and editing reports and features for newspapers. In these roles she has edited and sent more than 250 books to press, and edited reports, columns and features, and written news articles for two major national dailies—Mint Lounge and The New Indian Express. She was awarded the prestigious Rex Karmaveer Global Fellowship and Karmaveer Chakra 2014–15 for the stories she reported and wrote for The New Indian Express. This is a civilian honour given by the Indian Confederation of NGOs (iCONGO) in partnership with the United Nations (UN).  She has conducted numerous workshops on writing and editing, the most recent being an editing workshop at Jesus and Mary College, Delhi, and a writing workshop at NITI Aayog. Penguin has givenher multiple awards in recognition of her leadership skills. 

Janice Pariat is the author of Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories, Seahorse: A Novel andThe Nine Chambered-Heart: A Novella. She was awarded the Young Writer Award from the Sahitya Akademi and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction in 2013. She studied English Literature at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and History of Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Her work—including art reviews, book reviews, fiction and poetry—has featured in a wide selection of national magazines and newspapers.  In 2014, she was the Charles Wallace Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Kent, UK. Currently, she lives in New Delhi with a cat of many names.

Rahul Soni is a writer, editor and translator based in India. He is Senior Commissioning Editor (Literary) at HarperCollins Publishers India. He was previously Editorial Head at Writer’s Side, a literary agency and manuscript assessment service, Associate Editor at Almost Island, a journal for literature that “threatens, confronts, or bypasses the marketplace”, and Season Coordinator at the Sangam House international writers’ residency program. He founded and, from 2008 to 2012, edited Pratilipi, a literary journal, and Pratilipi Books, an independent publishing imprint, and from 2013 to 2015 was Editor-at-Large (India) at Asymptote, an international journal of literature in translation. He was a Charles Wallace Visiting Fellow in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in 2010 and received the Sangam House Fellowship in 2012. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Almost Island, Asymptote, Biblio, La Hoja de Arena, Poetry at Sangam, Poetry International Web, Pratilipi, Recours au Poème, Tehelka, The Four Quarters Magazine, The Indian Quarterly and other venues. He edited the anthology of Hindi Poetry in English translation, Home from a Distance (Pratilipi Books, 2011), and translated Shrikant Verma’s collection of poetry, Magadh (Almost Island Books, 2013), Geetanjali Shree’s novel The Roof Beneath Their Feet (HarperCollins, 2013), and a selection of Ashok Vajpeyi’s poetry A Name for Every Leaf (HarperCollins, 2016).

Vineet Gill is a writer and an editor. He previously worked as a journalist for over 10 years. Currently, he works as a senior copy editor at Penguin Random House India and has published his work in various Indian and international publications, including Guernica, Eurozine, The Caravan, Open, The Hindu, Scroll, The Times of India, Ord and Bild (Sweden) and Die Tageszeitung (Germany) among others. His first book, Here and Hereafter, a literary biography of the Hindi writer Nirmal Verma, will be published by Penguin in September 2022. 

Gurveen Chadha is Commissioning Editor at Penguin Random House India. She started her career at Random House India in 2011. Over the years she has published a range of bestsellers across different segments—from fiction and self-help to fitness and parenting. Her list of current and forthcoming authors include Soha Ali Khan (The Perils of being Moderately Famous), Milind Soman, Manisha Koirala, Neeraj Kumar (Dial D for Don), Nidhi Dugar Kundalia (The Lost Generation) , Vasudha Rai (Glow), Vikrant Khanna (The Girl who Knew Too Much), Yasmin Karachiwala (Strength and Train: the Pilates Way), Richa Chadha and Shenaz Treasurywala. When she’s not reading or editing, she can be found trekking the Himalayas or running races.

Elizabeth Kuruvilla is Executive Editor at Penguin Random House. She commissions literary non-fiction and fiction for the publishing house. For two decades before she joined the publishing industry, she worked as a journalist with well-known national newspapers and magazines, such as The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, Mint, The Hindu and Open magazine. She was briefly also Editor, Blouin ArtInfo, an international art newspaper headquartered in New York.

Priya-Alika Elias is a lawyer and writer currently based in New Delhi. She has just published her first novel with Penguin Random House, titled Besharam. She has been writing for American magazines such as The New Republic, Vox, Vice, The Outline and Racked for years – and has written everything from advice columns to fiction and poetry.

Manan Kapoor is the author of A Map of Longings: The Life and Works of Agha Shahid Ali (Yale University Press, 2022, Vintage, Penguin Random House India, 2021). His debut novel The Lamentations of a Sombre Sky was shortlisted for Sahitya Akademi’s Yuva Puruskar 2017. In 2019, he was a writer-in-residence at Sangam House Writers’ Residency. His writings have appeared in The Caravan Magazine, Boston Review, The Hindu, Scroll, The Wire, and Firstpost among others. He currently lives in Manali.

Akshay Gajria is the director of Tall Tales, one of India’s biggest story-telling platforms. As a part of Tall Tales, he regularly hosts workshops and live-shows where the focus is on story-telling and how to extract plots and characters from everyday life. He has also been writing for the past seven years, and some of his work has been published in various online magazines. He has been a co-contributor of the book Hack into your Creativity – Story Prompts for every type of Writer, published by Penguin. He has also copy-edited The Best of Tall Tales, published by Rupa Publications.

Shalvi Shah is a writer, translator and critic based in New York and Ahmedabad. Her work, translations, and criticism have appeared in Words Without Borders, Epiphany magazine, the Desi Books platform, Columbia Journal, the New York Times, Scroll.in, and are forthcoming elsewhere. She received her MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University, where she also received a Scholarship and a Teaching Fellowship. She has taught undergraduate fiction at Columbia University and currently mentors at the Alekhya Writing Retreat set in the Parvati Valley, at the foothills of the Himalayas. Translating on commission, her preferred languages are Gujarati, Hindi, and English, although she occasionally dabbles in Spanish.