Chitra
read non-fiction
features and jokes from Reader's Digest when she was ten. She is
usually quiet amongst new people. But her friends know her as talkative
and funny . Chitra makes friends easily and is always ready to help
them. She won the Best Storytelling prize when she was seven. She loves being with young children and started storytelling to
her cousins when she was eight or nine. She made up limericks and stories
and acted in plays written and directed by her mother every year during
summer vacation. Along with friends, she also started a magazine for
local residents, written and copied using carbon and charged 25 paise
for each copy. She took to fund-raising and volunteer work while in
school, following in her mother's footsteps.
Chitra started writing poetry in Tamil when she was 14. Encouraged by her teachers, she wrote about nature, love and her country. She went on to write in Hindi and English as well. During her years in Junior College, she wrote songs for puppet shows for her Economics projects and wrote for her school magazines. She won the Best Poetry Award in Junior College. During her first year as an under-graduate, Chitra entered an essay in Tamil, on the state of education in India. Her essay won the first prize in the all-state competition.
In 1999, she moved to Singapore,
to work as a programmer in a bank. That was when she decided to go back
to writing. Her first choice was writing for children and after ten
years of learning the craft and the business, she is proud to have
published over 20 titles and hopes to keep writing for a long time.
Chitra also writes for magazines and
writes a column on her blogspot
too.
When all the writing and reading is done, she is a whiz in the kitchen, whipping up spicy, hot Indian vegetarian food. Currently she lives in London, where she works in a bank (where they say she bosses everyone around) and writes children's books in all the free time she can get.
She visits the SouthBank, Hyde Park to write and to get inspired. She also takes an active interest in the writing community of SCBWI.