Manjula Padmanabhan is an author, playwright and cartoonist. Her play Harvest won the 1997 Onassis Award for Theatre. Her weekly comic strip ‘Sukiyaki’ appears in Chennai’s Business Line. Her novels Escape and The Island of Lost Girls are set in a brutal future world. Her three most recent books are Blood and Laughter, a collection of full-length plays; Laughter and Blood, a collection of short performance pieces; and a new edition of Getting There, her funny-scary travel memoir first published in 1999. She lives in the US with an alternate base in New Delhi, India.