Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971 and educated in India, England, and the United States. She studied creative writing at Columbia University, where she was the recipient of a Woolrich Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and Salman Rushdie's anthology Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian Writing. In 2006 Desai won the Man Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss.
Meera Simhan was born in England and raised in Southern California and India. After graduating from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Meera has been working in television and film in England and the United States both as an actress and a writer. In the U.S., Meera’s television credits include recurring and guest-starring roles in such shows as The Resident, EVIL, The Flash, New Girl, House, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Her film credits include Four Samosas, which recently premiered at the Tribeca film festival, Definition Please, Miss India America, and Hello I Must Be Going. She has performed in theater at The Taper Too, The Pacific Playwrights Festival, and at the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference. Meera co-wrote the feature, Miss India America, which is currently streaming on HULU. Meera is a Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment (CAPE) fellow.