This year's London book fair celebrates the diversity of contemporary Indian writing.

Kamila Shamsie, novelist
Qurratulain Hyder, novelist, short story writer and prose stylist of rare accomplishment, is one of Urdu's greatest writers. Literary critic Aamer Hussein has compared her to her contemporaries, Milan Kundera and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as "one of the world's major writers: eclectic, iconoclastic and versatile". In her 30s, she wrote her magnum opus, Aag ka Darya - published in English for the first time in 1998 as River of Fire - a great river of a novel, majestic in its sweep, grand in its vision. She maintained that writing can encompass "fact, reportage, imagination, documentary presentation, the epistolary form", even cinematic treatment. All her novels, novellas and short stories are a testament to this belief, as well as to her cosmopolitanism and uncompromising secularism.