Manjula Padmanabhan

Manjula Padmanabhan Biography

Manjula Padmanabhan is a noted writer, who is also known as an artist, illustrator and cartoonist. She writes plays, children books and novels.  Manjula is popularly known as a children’s writer. "Lights Out" and “Harvest” are her plays. Award winning film – Deham was based on her play Harvest. Three Virgins and Other Stories, I am different! Can you find me?, Unprincess! and A Visit to the City Market are her illustration works. She has contributed in the form of illustrations and comic strips. Kleptomania is a collection of short stories, while her last book – Escape was published in 2008. Her comic strip Double talk was published by Penguin books in 2005.

She was born in 1953 into a diplomat family in Delhi. She spent her school days in a boarding school. Since college days she had great passion to publish her works and do something related to media. She started writing columns for newspapers and achieved success writing comedy strips and cartoons. Suki – a comedy character created by Manjula became indeed popular. Till her new innings as a playwright and children’s writer, she was known as a cartoonist and comedy strip writer. Her play Harvest earned her Greek Onassis Award and it was made to an English multiple-award winning film – Deham in 2001. The movie was directed by noted filmmaker - Govind Nihalani. The movie starred Kitu Gidwani, Joy Sengupta and Alyy Khan in lead roles.

The Delhi-based writer is the creator of the cartoon strip “Double Talk” with “Suki” as a character. The comedy strip first appeared in 1982 in Sunday Observer. She has been a working artist and writer since the time she left school. After her celebrated play Harvest, she concentrated on to her writing career and she succeeded.

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Updated: March 20, 2016