Farrukh Dhondy

– Farrukh Dhondy is a shining star of literary culture, who we are thrilled to have on board as a writer for this series. A master of multiple mediums, he has won the Samuel Beckett Prize for Best Single Play of the year for Come to Mecca, has topped best-seller lists with his novel, The Bikini Murders, as well as Black Swan and The Siege of Babylon. He pioneered the exploration of the Indian British Cultural experience in 1977 with his short story collection East End At Your Feet and has scribed films for both Hollywood and Bollywood films such as Bandit Queen, The Rising, American Daylight, Jinnah, Mangal Pandey, and Maqbool. As Commissioning Editor for Multi-Cultural Programming for Channel 4 (84-97), he commissioned hundreds of hours of TV in all genres, including the Oscar-nominated Salaam Bombay, Shekhar Kapoor’s Bandit Queen, and award-winning TV shows like Desmond’s and Family Pride. Most recently, he collaborated with Academy Award-winning screenwriter John Ridley on the Showtime series Guerilla starring Idris Elba and Freida Pinto, as a story doctor on the series. A graduate of Cambridge that has taught screenwriting classes at Oxford, Farrukh has a deep understanding of multi cultures.