Manjula Padmanabhan is a writer, artist and playwright. She grew up in Europe and Southeast Asia, and returned to India as a teenager in the late 1960s. The popular comic strip character Suki, created by Manjula, appeared in the Sunday Observer in Bombay and later in The Pioneer in New Delhi through the 1980s and 1990s. In 1997, her play Harvest won first place in the Onassis Prize for Theatre in Greece. She is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including Hot Death, Cold Soup, Kleptomania, Three Virgins and Other Stories, Escape and Island of Lost Girls, and a number of books for children as author-illustrator, among them Mouse Attack and Mouse Invaders, and a series of picture puzzle books. The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction Volume 2 features Preface and Afterword by her.