Anand Neelakantan

Anand Neelakantan an Indian novelist, columnist, screenwriter, and public speaker. One of India's best selling authors , He is known for writing mythological fiction and has authored 15 books in English and one in Malayalam. He has been writing a column in the ''The New Indian Express'' since 2017.

He follows the style of telling stories based on the perspective of the antagonists or supporting characters. His debut work ''Asura: Tale of the Vanquished'' (2012) was based on the Indian epic ''Ramayana'', told from the perspective of Ravana—the first book in his ''Ramayana'' series. It was followed by series of books based on characters from ''Mahabharata'' and ''Baahubali''. His books have been translated to different languages such as Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Assamese, English, Sinhalese, Burmese, Japense and Indonesian. Anand has written screenplays for Hindi television serials, such as ''Siya Ke Ram'' on Star TV, ''Mahabali Hanuman'' on Sony TV, ''Chakravarthy Ashoka'' on Colors TV, ''Sarfarosh'' on Netflix, ''Swaraj'' on DD National, ''Srimad Ramayan'' on Sony TV, among others. He has written the story for the OTT series ''TAJ'' on Zee5. Anand has acted in two advertisement films and has also played the role of Ettappa Naicker in the TV show ''Swaraj'' on Doordarshan.

His ''Asura'' was featured in the list of "100 books by Indian authors to read in a lifetime" by Amazon Books editors. The book has sold more than a million copies over the years. Three of his books have been shortlisted for Crossword Book Award. He was listed as one among the "100 top celebrities in India" in 2015 and in 2017 by ''Forbes India''. Anand also writes a column for ''The New Indian Express'' on current affairs and his fortnightly column is called ''Acute Angle''. Provided by Wikipedia