Prayaag Akbar

Prayaag Akbar was born in Calcutta in 1982. He studied economics at Dartmouth College and comparative politics at the London School of Economics, and spent a year at Routledge, UK, as a publicity assistant. His award-winning reports and commentary have examined various aspects of marginalisation in India. His debut novel Leila takes place in the near future.

An obsession with purity escalates and walls come up dividing and confining communities. In the forgotten spaces between, where garbage gathers and disease festers, Shalini must search for Leila, the daughter she lost one tragic summer sixteen years ago. From one of India's pre-eminent journalists writing on caste, this tale of motherly love blends the page-turning urgency of The Girl in the Red Coat with the political force of Slumdog Millionaire to create a searing parable about what happens when the few live at the expense of the many.