Swati Kaushal

Bestselling Indian author Swati Kaushal was born in New Delhi, India, in a time well before computers, cell phones, or social media!

Despite these devastating privations, she has only happy memories of her childhood; of playing hide and seek and double dare with her friends, of ice cream carts and orange bars, and of reading, reading, reading to her heart's content.

In school, she was the quiet girl with the explosion of subversive ideas bubbling behind a pair of nerdy glasses.

She grew up reading mysteries and romances tucked inside her math and physics textbooks, thereby not getting into IIT and shattering forever her chances of winning the Nobel prize in Physics or Chemistry. Ah well.

For college, she headed to Lady Shriram College in New Delhi where she earned a BA in Economics and an honorary doctorate in samosas, chai and gal-pal bonding.

During a two-year stint at The Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (now Kolkata), Swati pursued her interests in marketing and mishti, and finance and friends, graduating with a degree in marketing, and a plan to revolutionize the world, one limited time offer at a time.

After six years of selling milk powder, dessert mixes and health beverages at Nestle, and a year of selling mobile phones at Nokia, Swati decided life was too short to not indulge her fantasy of writing something that required no approvals and had not a chance in hell of selling.

Et Voila, Piece Of Cake, which was a hoot to write, and became an instant bestseller. Still selling briskly after ten years, Piece of Cake has been translated into Marathi and German languages, and continues to provoke, confound, infuriate and entertain.

Swati's second novel, A Girl Like Me, is a tribute to her growing up years, chronicling, through her heroine Ani Rai, the academic hardships, redeeming friendships, insecurities and heartbreak that are an inescapable part of teenage life.

A Girl Like Me has achieved wide success, becoming a best-selling, young adult classic, and continues to be enjoyed by readers in both India and Germany.

Swati worked off the premise "who says a cop can't be a girl?" to create Niki Marwah, the iconic heroine of her third novel, Drop Dead.

Tough on crime but soft at heart, Niki pursues bad guys and romance with equal gusto, and was an instant hit with readers and critics, helping Swati get nominated for the Femina L'Oreal 2013 Women of Worth award.

Lethal Spice, Swati's latest book and the second installment in the Niki Marwah series, is deliciously thrilling and absolutely unputdownable, so you should put aside all other plans, buy it immediately, and start reading it right now.

Like most people in this world, Swati now has a computer, a cell phone and multiple social media accounts.

But odds are you'll still find her surreptitiously reading something she shouldn't stuck between the pages of something everyone tells her she should.