Ever Heard of a Watermelon God?

Neha Singh is a Mumbai based children’s author, theatre practitioner and activist.

Neha has written eight books for children and young adults. “The Wednesday Bazaar” (2013) and “Bela misses her train” (2017) for Karadi Tales, “Moongphali” (2017) for Rupa Publishers, “I need to pee” (2018) for Penguin Random House India, “Its playtime” (2018) and “Kuchh gadbad hai” (2019) and “On the metro”(2020) for Pratham Books and “Is it the same for you?” (2019) for Seagull Books, India. Neha has contributed stories to The Hindu Young World Anthology (2019) and “Thank God its Caturday”, a Westland Publication (2020). She also writes poems, fiction and non-fiction in Hindi for children and young adults that feature regularly in children’s magazines “Cycle”, “Pluto” and “Chakmak”. Her poems and stories for children have been turned into posters, bookmarks and poetry cards for children.

Neha’s books have been nominated for several Indian and international awards like Jarul Book Awards, Neev Literary Awards, Comicon India Awards, Peekabook Awards and her book “I need to pee” won a commendation at the South Asia Book Awards 2019 in the U.S.A. She has travelled to various literary festivals across India with her books, like the Kalaghoda Arts festival, Mumbai, The Hindu Lit of Live, Chennai, Kolkata Literary festival, Jaipur Literature Festival, Jaipur, Kitaabo children’s literature festival, Jodhpur, Bookaroo children’s literature festivals in Jaipur and Srinagar, Peekabook children’s literary festival, Mumbai, Neev literary festival, Bangalore etc.

Neha is also a theatre practitioner and acts, writes, directs and produces plays. She has her own theatre company called “Rahi theatre” and has produced two plays “Dohri Zindagi” and “Jhalkari” that have toured across the country and have had 75 shows.

Neha runs a women’s rights campaign called “Why loiter?” that aims at reclaiming public spaces for women by loitering in them. She was chosen as “One of hundred most influential women in the world” in 2016 by BBC for her work. She blogs about the campaign at whyloiter.blogspot.com