Shashi Warrier was born in 1959 to a soldier and a housewife, and spent the first ten years of his life travelling with his parents and siblings. He didn’t shine at school, or later at his college, BITS, Pilani, where he went intending to learn engineering but ended up with a degree in economics. Needless to say, most of his later career had nothing to do with either economics or engineering. He started writing full-time in the mid-1990s, after a varied career that included research, copywriting, journalism, consulting, computing, and management. After over a dozen years of changing careers without gaining much satisfaction out of any of them, he turned to writing. His first books were for children: The Hidden Continent and Suzy’s Gift, beside stories included in anthologies. He discovered that writing for children is much harder than writing for grown-ups, and wrote several thrillers (Night of the Krait, The Orphan, Sniper, The Man Who Wouldn’t Be God, The Girl Who Didn’t Give up), a semi-fictional autobiography of a hangman (Hangman’s Journal), some literary fiction (The Homecoming), and a satire (The Pillow Talk Movies) before returning to stories for children with The Blue Kangaroo and The Frazzler Bear. In the pipeline are another satire (By God, or The Making of a Messiah, Prakash Books) and a work of literary fiction (Sara, HarperCollins). His ambition is to write one really good fairy tale.
Delegate | 2018