Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri was the youngest entrant into the Indian Foreign Service. After representing India abroad in key bilateral and multilateral diplomatic assignments for twenty-eight years, she went on to serve at the United Nations for fifteen years in various leadership capacities.
She has been honoured with the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award, the Novus Award for Championing the Sustainable Development Goals, the Millennium Campus Award, and the Global Generation Award as an Inspiration for Youth, among others. She is a distinguished fellow of the Indian Association of International Studies, and a visiting professor at the South Asian University, New Delhi.
Puri is also the author of the national bestseller and critically acclaimed novel Swallowing the Sun. The book has received several literary honours, including the Kalinga Literary Award, the Delhi Literature Festival Fiction Prize, the Pandit Hari Dutt Sharma Award, the Special Jury Award at the FICCI Publishing Awards for Book of the Year–Fiction (English), and the REC-VoW Book Award for English Fiction. It is being translated into multiple Indian languages and adapted into a web series by Abundantia Entertainment.