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 prize in the Onassis Prize for Theatre in Greece. She is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including Getting There, Hot Death, Cold Soup, Kleptomania and Three Virgins and Other Stories, and a number of books for children as author-illustrator, among them Mouse Attack and a series of picture puzzle books. Her forthcoming novel entitled The Island of Lost Girls will be published by Hachette India in 2015.