Farrukh Dhondy

Farrukh Dhondy is an award-winning author, screenwriter, playwright and activist. Born in Poona (now Pune) India in 1944 in a Parsi family, he came to the UK on a scholarship to read Natural Sciences and then English at Cambridge University. After university he kicked off a career in journalism interviewing Pink Floyd and Allen Ginsberg and covering the first meeting between the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. While a student and schoolteacher in Leicester and London he got involved with political activism, at first in the Indian Workers' Association, Leicester, and then in the UK Black Panther Movement and subsequently in the Race Today Collective where he worked alongside Darcus Howe and CLR James. He published his first books in the late 1970s and several TV drama and situation comedy series in the early 1980s and in 1984 worked as a Commissioning Editor, Multicultural programming for Channel 4 TV, UK in which capacity he was the driving force behind Desmonds, Salaam Bombay and the trailblazing Bandung File among fourteen years of diverse programming.