Manjula Padmanabhan is a writer, artist, cartoonist and playwright. She lives in the US, with a part-time home in New Delhi.

She is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including her travel-memoir Getting There, and the first two of a science fiction trilogy, Escape and The Island of Lost Girls. Her play Harvest won the 1997 Onassis Prize for Theatre in Greece. She has published more than twenty illustrated books for children as author-artist, including Unprincess, Mouse Attack, I Am Different and Mama, What is The Night?. Her female comic-strip character SUKI has appeared in mass-circulation newspapers such as The Sunday Observer, The Pioneer and BusinessLine.