Manjula Padmanabhan is a writer, artist and playwright. She grew up in Europe and Southeast Asia, and returned to India as a teenager in the late 1960s. The popular comic strip character Suki, created by Manjula, first appeared in print during the 1980s and was recently revived in The Hindu BusinessLine, the Chennai-based financial newspaper. In 1997, her play Harvest won first place in the Onassis Prize for Theatre in Greece. She is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including Kleptomania, Three Virgins and Other Stories, Escape, The Island of Lost Girls and Hot Death, Cold Soup. She has also written and illustrated a number of books for children, among them Mouse Attack and Mouse Invaders, and a series of picture puzzle books.