Dr Shashi Tharoor is the bestselling author of nineteen books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a noted critic and columnist. His books include the path-breaking satire The Great Indian Novel (1989), the classic India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), the bestselling An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, for which he won the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence, 2016, for Books (Non-Fiction) and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2019, and most recently, The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and His India and The Hindu Way: An Introduction to Hinduism. He was a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and a former Minister of State for Human Resource Development and Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. He is a three-time member of the Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram and chairs Parliament’s Standing Committee on Information Technology (IT). He has won numerous literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was honoured as New Age Politician of the Year (2010) by NDTV. He was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India’s highest honour for overseas Indians. He was given the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.