About The Author

Mariam Karim-Ahlawat is a teacher of French Language and Literature, freelance editor, and a writer of fiction for children and adults. She was born in Lucknow and educated at JNU, New Delhi, and the Sorbonne, Paris.
Her first novel, My Little Boat (Penguin India, 2003), was nominated for the IMPAC International Award 2005 and the Hutch Crossword Award. Her second novel, entitled The Street of Mists, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2009. Her plays, The Betrayal of Selvamary (shortlisted for the Hindu Metro Plus Playwright Award 2010) and Fractals Search for the Real (longlisted for the Hindu Metro Plus Playwright Award 2011) will both be performed in Delhi by the premier theatre group Pierrot’s Troupe. Her children’s musical about street children, A Bagful of Dreams, was performed in Delhi (Nov 10, 2012) to music by well-known author and musician Peggy Mohan.
Karim-Ahlawat also writes reviews and articles on literature and has contributed short stories to anthologies such as Siècle 21 (Paris), South Asian Review (University of Pittsburgh), and Our Voice (the PEN International Women Writers Anthology). For over eleven years she wrote a Read Aloud page in the magazine Parenting with her own illustrations, and published her first book of folk and fairy tales for children, Tales Old and New (Harper Collins India, 1994). Since then, she has published a number of children’s books (Tulika Publishers, Chennai) and contributed to anthologies available in several Indian languages.
Since 2000, she has been conceiving multimedia designs for children in subjects ranging from Science to Animation (e.g. NIIT, Animaster). She wrote a column on education and social issues for The Times of India Pluses for five years. She has recently completed a project with the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, writing and editing five books for children affected by HIV. These will be distributed free of cost through NGOs working with AIDS and mainstreamed through Vitasta Publishers. She is currently co-authoring a set of four visual books on green living for children for TERI with Mr Bharat Shekhar, and will shortly be working on a ‘Save the Ganga’ project with Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, India.