Shekhar Gupta is the Founder-Editor of ThePrint, India’s fastest growing multimedia news website known for its non-hyphenated journalism, which is neither Left nor Right, is liberal on society and liberal on economy.
He is a prolific columnist, with his highly influential weekly column National Interest which is translated into five languages. A selection of these columns was collected in the bestselling book Anticipating India. The new volume is under production now.
Shekhar is a recipient of several journalism awards, including the Inlaks Journalist of the Year Award (1985), the G.K Reddy Memorial Award (1987), the Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed Award for National Integration (2006), the Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak Award (2016), and the Padma Bhushan (2009).
At ThePrint, he hosts Off the Cuff, a video offering, which sees him in conversation with an eminent guest. His daily YouTube show Cut the Clutter explains and analyses the big news development of the day from India and around the world.
Between 2003 and 2017, Shekhar also hosted Walk the Talk on NDTV 24×7 every week. A collection of these news-making interviews has been published as a book Walk the Talk: Decoding Politicians.
In his four-decade career, Shekhar has reported on key Indian and international events, including the peak era of trouble in our Northeast, the Nellie massacre in Assam, Operation Blue Star, the student uprising in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first Gulf War from Baghdad, the first, US-backed jihad in Afghanistan, the many twists and turns in the troubled 1983-1993 decade in Sri Lanka’s Tamil North, and did more than a dozen tours of duty in Pakistan.
Before this, Shekhar served as editor-in-chief of The Indian Express for 19 years and simultaneously held the position of the company’s chief executive for 13 years.