Dr. Manju Kak is an author and academician, an art and cultural archivist. Her fiction, essays, critical reviews, and articles have appeared in anthologies, newspapers, journals, and magazines in India and abroad since 1989. Her published works of short fiction include First Light in Colonelpura, Requiem for an Unsung Revolutionary, Just One Life, and Other Stories.

Her curatorial work in visual ethnography and art/sociocultural studies on the Himalayas include an exhibition ‘A Craftsman and his Craft – Iconography of Woodcarvings of Kumaon, ‘They Who Walked Mountains’ (documentary); Nicholas Roerich: A Pact for Peace, & Kashmiri Pandits: A community in Exile – a Vintage Album. She has authored In the Shadow of the Devi-Kumaon Himalayas and “Nicholas Roerich – A Quest and Legacy, (Ed).

She is the recipient of national and international fellowships such as the Charles Wallace, Hawthornden Award, Breadloaf, and Senior Fellowship of the Ministry of Culture. She has had government consultancies, been a teacher, a visiting professor at important centres of learning and organized important and meaningful conferences. She has presented papers and participated in many conferences in India and overseas; Almaty, London, Edinburgh, New York, Montreal, Moscow, etc.

As a development journalist and as a panelist on national television she has advocated justice, women’s rights, and peac,e having spent 24 years in the Voluntary Sector, currently as Hon. Secretary General of the All India Womens’ Conference (estb. 1927) India’s largest NGO, where she has helped promote women’s rights. She is a former VP of International Alliance for Women, a Geneva based NGO, and current Convener of the Peace Commission, Trustee in the government funded Lal Bahadur Shastri Memorial Trust.