Ira Pande

Ira Pande is an Indian writer, translator, actress, and freelance editor. She began her career as a University lecturer and taught for about sixteen years at the Punjab University in Chandigarh. She also worked as the assistant editor of Seminar for some years after a short stint with the Indian Express. Later, Ira Pande was the editor of a book review journal known as “Bilbao,” from where she went on to be managing editor at Dorling-Kindersley. It is a publishing house famous for its illustrated knowledge books & travel guides. After that, she became the chief editor at Roil Books, India's best-known publishing house for illustrated books. As a chief editor of the India International Centre’s (IIC) Publication Division was her last editorial stint. She was the chief editor of the Publications Division of the IIC for almost six years and edited many volumes of the IIC Quarterly.

Ira Pande most often writes articles & book reviews for newspapers and journals. In 2005, she wrote a memoir of her mother, "Diddi: My Mother’s Voice,” documenting the life and times of the famous Hindi writer Shivani. The book was published by Penguin India in 2005. The book was shortlisted in the Hutch-Crossword Award for the best non-fiction category. Ira Pande has also translated Manohar Sham Joshi’s Hindi novel, T-ta Professor, which won the Vodaphone-Crossword Award in 2009. In 2010, she also won the Sahitya Akademi Award for the best translated work into English.

She has done English translation of Shivani’s “Apradhini: Women Without Men” book, a collection of her mother’s writings on women and published by HarperCollins-India. It is a collection of interviews with jailed women and some portraits & short stories of women. Ira Pande translated Prabha Khaitan’s autobiography, “Anya se Ananya” as “A Life Apart” from Hindi to English. It was published by Zubaan-Penguin at the 2013 edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Her other translation is “Amader Shantiniketan," a memoir of Tagore's well-known Ashram by her mother Shivani, who spent a decade there from 1935 to 1944. Ira Pande also writes a regular column for the Tribune.