Manjula Padmanabhan is an artist, illustrator, cartoonist, playwright and novelist. She has illustrated 21 children's books, and has had a longrunning cartoon strip, Suki, in the Sunday Observer and later the Pioneers. Her play, Harvest, was selected from 1470 entries in 76 countries for the Onassis Prize in 1997.
Alienation and marginalization play a large role in her books. Harvest is a futuristic play about the sale of body parts and exploitative relations between developed and developing countries. It is being filmed by Govind Nihalani. Her short stories are marked by a wry sense of humour.

Padmanabhan's latest book, Getting There is a semi-autobiographical novel about a young woman illustrator in Bombay. She describes it as being "based loosely on events in the author's life between 1977 and '78. Almost none of it is entirely factual, but as a whole it is more true than false"

Her cartoon strip, Suki, is also being published as a book in 2001, and her etchings are featured in their own exhibition in Delhi.

Manjula Padmanabhan was born in Delhi, grew up in Sweden, Pakistan and Thailand, and now lives in Delhi.