Official Bio
Ruchira Gupta is an Emmy winning journalist and founder of the anti sex trafficking NGO, Apne Aap that helps women and girls exit systems of prostitution. I Kick and I Fly is her debut fiction novel.
She has been given the French Ordre National du Mérite, Clinton Global Citizen Award, and the UN NGO CSW Woman of Distinction among other honors for her contribution to the establishment of the UN Trafficking Fund for Survivors, the passage of the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act and her grassroots activism with Apne Aap. She has co-wriiten a book with Gloria Steinem, As if Women Matter and edited two anthologies, River of Flesh and Renu’s letters to Birju Babu.
She holds a Doctor of Humane Letters from Smith College. Ruchira has worked for the United Nations in Nepal, Thailand, Kosovo, Iran, and USA. She teaches occasionally as a visiting professor at New York University.
She divides her time between New York and Forbesganj, her childhood home in the foothills of the Himalayas, where she paints her mother’s garden.
My Story
Ever since I can remember my father told me bedtime stories. I wanted to be a story-teller just like him.
I wanted to write stories about girls who fix problems. When the school magazine actually published my article, The Autobiography of a Pencil, I was ten. I immediately resolved to be a journalist.
I didn’t really want to go to college but the newspaper in Kolkata refused to give me a job without a degree. So, I went to college in the daytime and to work in the evening.
Once, while on assignment in Nepal I stumbled upon rows of villages with missing girls. I asked the villagers where all the girls were, and that question changed my life. I found that little girls as young as twelve were smuggled across the border and sold in brothels in India. I related the story in a documentary, The Selling of Innocents, and won an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism.
As a journalist, I had covered famine and conflict, but I had never witnessed such intimate violence and on this scale. I wanted to do more. So, I quit journalism and started the NGO, Apne Aap inside the red-light areas of India and began to work with the United Nations all over the world. I made many friends. Slowly but surely, I became part of a global movement against sex-trafficking.
I have won many awards. But I know that my work is not finished. I have written I Kick and I Fly so I can share the movement with you. I am still happiest when I can curl up in a corner with a book or take a walk with my dog.
