Harini Nagendra is a professor of ecology at Azim Premji University, and a well-known public speaker and writer on issues of nature and sustainability. She is internationally recognized for her scholarship on sustainability, with honors that include the 2009 Cozzarelli Prize from the US National Academy of Sciences, the 2013 Elinor Ostrom Senior Scholar award, and the 2017 Clarivate Web of Science award for interdisciplinary research in India.
Her non-fiction books include Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future, and three books co-authored with Seema Mundoli – Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India’s Cities, So Many Leaves, and Cities and Canopies: Trees in Indian Cities, which received the 2020 Publishing Next Awards for best English non-fiction book in India, and was featured on the 2021 Green Literature Festival’s honor list. The Bangalore Detectives Club was her first crime fiction novel. The sequel, Murder Under a Red Moon, was published in 2023, and the third book, A Nest of Vipers, will be out in May 2024.
Harini lives in Bangalore with her family, in a home filled with maps. She loves trees, mysteries, and traditional recipes.
To know more about Harini’s research, please head over to her university website.