Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri & Nirupama Kotru

An avid film buff who is also a senior civil servant, Nirupama Kotru found her avocation unite with her vocation in 2012 when she was posted as Director (Films) in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. She spent more than three years managing film units such as the NFDC and the Films Division, handling challenging policy matters such as censorship and archiving, driving initiatives such as single-window clearance for film shootings, besides promoting Indian cinema at film festivals abroad and at home, through initiatives such as the National Film Awards and IFFI, Goa. After this stint, she kept her passion alive by writing articles on films and film music. Until recently, as Joint Secretary, Culture, she nurtured the national academies of music, dance, theatre and art, and helped reinvent leading national museums. She actively participates in cultural and literary festivals where she promotes film, theatre and literature.

Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is an editor, critic and columnist. In 2017, he was named Editor of the Year by the apex publishing body, Publishing Next. He is a film and music buff, has been a consultant, writer and editor for the film website Cinemaazi.com, and writes regularly on books, films and music for a number of platforms, including The Telegraph. He started writing on a regular basis only in 2017, when Anupama Chopra asked him to cover Bengali cinema for Film Companion. He has over 200 bylines to his credit so far. He has worked with the Academy of Motion Pictures and the Film Heritage Foundation for their Oral History Programme, covering interviews with Soumitra Chatterjee and Madhabi Mukherjee, and has contributed an essay on Sai Paranjpye to Films Through Women’s Eyes: 17 Indian Directors, published by Suchitra Film Society. His poetry has been published by Undiscovered Journal and Borderless Journal, and made it to the annual Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2022. He is also a published author, with two books to his credit: Whims: A Book of Poems (published by Writers Workshop) and Icons from Bollywood (published by Penguin/Puffin). At present he is editor in chief at Om Books International.