Manjula Padmanabhan is a playwright, journalist, comic strip artist, and children's book author of the award winning play Harvest.She won the Greek Onassis Award for this 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.. Born in Delhi to a diplomat family in 1953, she went to boarding school in her teenage years. After college, her determination to make her own way in life led to works in publishing and media-related fields. She has 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 Sunday Observer. Before 1997 she was better known as cartoonist and had a daily cartoon strip in The Pioneer newspaper. 

January 1st, 1953 in Delhi (Age 71)