Srividya Natarajan, born in Chennai, now lives in Canada and teaches English at King’s University College, University of Western Ontario.

At the University of Hyderabad she became interested in the caste politics that are central to No Onions, parented both her own son and the snakes her husband brought home, and earned a Ph.D. in English.

 After a year as an editor at Katha Publishers, she began to illustrate children’s books for Orient Longman, the Karadi tales Company and Chatterbox.

Her favorite projects were four books in Tulia’s Under the Banyan series, now translated into six Indian languages, and Kali and the Rat Snake.

She co-authored Taking Charge of our Bodies, on women and health issues, with Veena Saturnina and Gita Ramaswamy (Penguin India, 2004); and co-directed Silambakoodam (2002), a documentary on the hereditary dance teachers of south India.

A student of the great dance master Ketapang Pillai, she has taught and performed classical dance for over twenty-two years in India and abroad. Her ambition is to combine writing her second novel with living in a tolerably clean house.