Amit Varma is a writer and podcaster based in Mumbai. He started his career in advertising, moved on to television, and has been a journalist since 2001. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Observer and almost every Indian publication. He is currently a columnist for the Times of India, Bloomberg Quint and Cricket Next.
He was managing editor of Cricinfo between 2003 and 2008, and a consulting editor at Yahoo after that. He relaunched the online magazine Pragati in 2017, as the chief editor, and made them podcasting pioneers by launching a series of podcasts for them.
He won the prestigious Bastiat Prize for Journalism in 2007 and 2015, becoming the first person to win it twice. In 2009, Business Week named him one of the 50 Most Powerful People in India.
He writes the blog India Uncut, which was one of India’s most popular blogs in the years it was active, between 2004 and 2008. It now serves as a repository of his published work, though he keeps promising to start blogging again.
He was a serious poker player for a few years, and wrote a column on poker called Range Rover for the Economic Times.
He also hosts the weekly podcast, The Seen and the Unseen, which gets over 225,000 downloads a month.
He has written one book, My Friend Sancho, which was the biggest-selling debut novel in India in 2009. More books are forthcoming.