Sudha Murthy

Sudha Murty is an Indian engineer, author and philanthropist, born in Shiggaon in what is now Karnataka. She is best known for her fiction and non-fiction, written in both Kannada and English, and for her social work in education and child welfare.

She grew up in a Kannada-speaking household: her father was a surgeon and her mother a schoolteacher. Part of her childhood was spent in the care of her grandparents, an experience that later became the basis of her stories and of her first widely known book, How I Taught My Grandmother to Read. She completed an engineering degree in electrical engineering and went on to a master's in computer science at the Indian Institute of Science. She is said to have become the first woman engineer hired by Tata Motors (TELCO) after writing to the company's chairman to complain about its men-only culture. She later worked for the Walchand group. In 1996 she founded the Infosys Foundation, which she chairs, and has since supported orphanages, rural development projects and the provision of computers and libraries to government schools across Karnataka.

Her writing covers novels, travelogues, children's stories and non-fiction. Her stories often deal with charity, hospitality and the search for self-understanding, told in plain and close-to-home language. Her Kannada novel Dollar Sose, later published in English as Dollar Bahu, was adapted into a television series by Zee TV in 2001, and her story Runa inspired a Marathi film. How I Taught My Grandmother to Read has been translated into many languages.

Her legacy lies in both literature and philanthropy. She received the Padma Shri in 2006 and the Padma Bhushan in 2023, and in 2024 she was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's Parliament, for her work in social welfare and education.