Minakshi Thakur worked for five years at Westland/Amazon as publisher of its Indian literature imprint. She set up EKA, which is a 360-degree programme for publishing original writing and translations in ten Indian languages including English. Under the imprint she published leading writers like Manoranjan Byapari, Vivek Shanbagh, Volga, Vishwas Patil, Amitav Ghosh, Perumal Murugan, Unni R., Indu Menon, V.J. James, Anant Vijay, Sanjeev Paliwal,Vishwas Patil, Vijai Trivedi, Amish, Ashwin Sanghi and Chetan Bhagat, among others.
Between 2007 and 2017, she worked with HarperCollins India, where she was in charge of its imprint for translations from the languages into English, Harper Perennial, where she published writers like Gulzar, Javed Akhtar, Jayant Kaikini, P. Subhashchandran, T.D. Ramakrishnan, Sethumadhavan, Devibharathi, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Pravinsinh Chahhbra, Arupa Patanga Kalita, Pran Kishore, Mahabaleshwar Sail, Mohan Rakesh, Ranjit Desai, N.S. Inamdar, Intizar Husain, Krishna Sobti, among others. She also set up Harper’s Hindi programme, publishing in the language Hindi’s highest-selling author Surender Mohan Pathak, best-selling Hindi journalist-writer Vijai Trivedi, numerous anthologies of classic and contemporary Hindi writing, crime fiction by Ibne Safi, translations of books by Paulo Coelho, Agatha Christie, Nadine Gordimer, Perumal Murugan, among others.
She is also a bi-lingual poet and writer. Her collection of Hindi poems, Neend Ka Akhiri Pul was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2012. She has been a fellow to many international writers’ residencies. Her first novel, Lovers Like You and I, was shortlisted for the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize 2013.
Currently she works as Publisher, Indian Literature (Eka) with Westland Books, a division of Pratilipi, India’s most successful multi-format publishing company.