Manjula Padmanabhan

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Manjula Padmanabhan (born 1953) is a playwright, journalist, comic strip artist, and children's book author responsible for the award-winning play Harvest. It won the first Onassis prize for Theater after it premiered in Greece in 1999. She has also written such plays as Lights Out! (1984), The Artist's Model (1995) and Sextet (1996).

She has authored a collection of short stories, called Kleptomania. The title of the collection is named after one of the stories in the collection of the same name, which has the underlying theme that authors compulsively steal things from their immediate environment; for instance, from the lives of their friends and relatives. In these short stories, the author displays her superior imagination and her boldness to deal with unusual and disturbing themes, as evident in the plot of title story Kleptomania. Another well known book which is a collection of short stories is Hot Death, Cold Soup (1995). She created Suki, one of few Indian female comic characters, which was serialized as a strip in Sunday Observer.