10 Best Biography Books and Memoirs to Read

Welcome to a world where reality often exceeds fiction, where the lives of extraordinary individuals unfold like captivating tales waiting to be discovered. 

Memoirs and biography books offer a gateway into the hearts and minds of people who have shaped history or experienced remarkable journeys. Imagine delving into the triumphs and tribulations of iconic figures, feeling their struggles, victories, and moments of vulnerability. 

Join us on a journey through some of the best biographies of lives well-lived.

We have something for everyone from biographies & autobiographies of Indians, autobiography books in Hindi, and international memoir books and true stories.

Biographies & Autobiography Books of Famous Indians

These biography books illuminate the essence of India’s diverse culture, spirituality, and enduring legacy on the global stage.

Adman Madman by Prahlad Kakar & Rupangi Sharma

In 1971, clutching a princely sum of three hundred rupees in his pocket, Prahlad Kakar arrived in Bombay Central station. During his early days of dire struggle, he slept on benches in train stations and on the sofas of reluctant friends. Scratching the underbelly of Colaba Causeway, he learnt many life lessons for his survival and eventual climb to notoriety.

Four decades later, he swears by Murphy’s law, ‘Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.’ Murphy is certainly not a figment of anyone’s imagination, but a gargoyle plucked from VT station, who is sitting crouched on your shoulder and waiting for an opportunity to pee into your ear. Come and share some uproarious laughs with the Indian ad industry’s feared and beloved leprechaun as he takes you on this rollercoaster ride. From the bizarre to the brazen, prepare yourself for one hell of a journey.

Why does Prahlad have the right to lay claim to Shabana Azmi’s second toe?

Why did Satish Shah pretend to be a chauffeur during a shoot?

Can a parachute-landing fall save you from a dating disaster?

How did a pig drive a member of the film crew straight to the shrink?

Meet Dumbell the Doberman. And Head of Outstanding Collections.

In this no-holds-barred memoir, Prahlad serves up scoops of his most unforgettable experiences, peppered with viciously funny anecdotes from his personal life and seasoned with lessons on how to tell a riveting story in thirty seconds.

Learn secrets of the trade to create memorable brands. Travel behind the scenes of celebrated advertisements that launched the careers of models who then went on to become famous Bollywood actors. Hear about the genesis of this accidental serial entrepreneur. And, above all, learn how to live life with complete abandon from none other than the enfant terrible of the advertising industry. As the man who wears many hats, literally and figuratively, Prahlad tips his hat to life’s incidental wisdom with raucous laughter.

From those who have a love for advertising to those who have a zest for life, from the young to the old, this memoir will capture your heart and your mind, and tickle your funny bone.

Statutory Warning: This book may cause you to fall off your chair!

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Insatiable: My Hunger for Life by Shobhaa Dé

‘I promise not to be three things–profound, pedantic and pretentious,’ says Shobhaa De, as she begins her heart-warming book.

It’s a promise India’s most beloved writer delivers on in her irreverent memoir about the year leading up to her landmark seventy-fifth birthday. Quintessential exuberance and keen observations firmly in place, she tells us about travelling solo, feasting (and fasting) with family and friends, the triumphs and losses that accompany ageing, the vagaries and vulnerabilities of being a writer and, above all, how food connects people in the most unexpected places and delightful ways.

From where to find the most delicious lassi in Jaipur, her obsession with kasundi and conversations with a Nobel Laureate who is a gourmet to M.F. Husain’s last food khwaish and what’s served at Aamir Khan’s dinner table, Shobhaa takes us into the dining rooms of politicians, artists and celebrities, to festivals and parties and other social events, and, more privately, into her home, where food is always the prime subject of conversation.

In Insatiable, Shobhaa reminds us of the many delights and disappointments that the banquet of life offers, even as she examines the shared emotional hunger for happiness and love that binds us all.

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The Scrapper’s Way by Damodar Padhi

So, you were not born with a silver spoon? You did not study in a ‘well-known’ school? You could not afford to go to a great college? You were not privileged enough to secure your dream job? Like it or not, but we live in an unequal world; life here does not promise fair treatment to every individual. If you were born lucky and could afford it all, this book can at best intrigue you a bit, but it is not really meant for you. If not, this is exactly the book you need. Welcome to the Scrapper’s club. The only two things you need to be here are a dream to succeed and an urge to face life as it appears before you without whining. This book does not promise you the moon (and neither will it deliver any). For more than three decades, Damodar Padhi has used this time-tested and all weather resistant (read resilient) approach with great success. If you are someone who equates success to only money and power, keep the book back on the shelf and browse on. But if you are looking for success that includes financial freedom, happiness, and purpose, we are ON. The Scrapper’s Way will take you through life’s many crossroads and teach you the art of making sensible personal choices both at work and in personal life, and above all purpose to enrich every aspect of it. One part in every story as a behind-the-scenes memoir, the other part as the fuel to make you think; this book will lay out your own path to success in an unequal world.

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Indian Lives – Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: The Art of Freedom by Nico Slate

In 1947, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay made an unexpected visit to a gloomy government building in New Delhi to confront one of the gravest crises facing the newly independent nation-the fate of the millions of refugees pouring across the borders with Pakistan. She had no official standing, but somehow managed to arrange for a piece of land just outside the capital, where a model town would be built to house 30,000 people. This town is today’s Faridabad.

This is just one of the many efforts-often forgotten-made by an indomitable woman who strove to empower others throughout her life. Born a Saraswat Brahmin in Mangalore, Kamaladevi was a performing artist, a Gandhian, a social reformer, an educationist, an institution builder, a patron of the arts, an author, a visionary. She built bridges across divides decreed by tradition, while establishing her own identity as an Indian woman finding a place for herself in a male-dominated world. Her dream was of an India that was free not just of colonial rule but of the shackles of poverty, caste oppression and gender disparities.

Nico Slate’s new and definitive biography explores the life of Kamaladevi, one of the most inspiring figures of twentieth-century India.

This is the third book in the Indian Lives series, edited and curated by Ramachandra Guha.

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Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll : My Early Years by Romulus Whitaker & Janaki Lenin

A legend in the arena of wildlife conservation and affectionately hailed as the ‘Snakeman of India’, Romulus Whitaker has had a lifelong love affair with the ‘fierce creatures’ that share our planet. This first volume of his fascinating memoir brings the India of the 1950s and the US of the 1960s to life.

When his mother married and moved to Mumbai, Whitaker was transplanted from a conventional childhood in the US to what was for him the exciting world of India. At boarding school in Kodai, he kept a pet python under his bed and realized that all he really wanted to do was work with snakes. Sent to the US for college, Whitaker preferred snakes to lecture halls and left to work in a snake farm. The adventures that ensue are hair-raising and often hilarious.

Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll tells the story of a boy who would become one of the greatest conservationists of his generation, discovering the wonders of India’s extraordinary natural world.

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The Last Courtesan: Writing My Mother’s Memoir by Manish Gaekwad

The 1993 Bow Bazaar bomb blast in Calcutta brought an end to the kothas in the busy commercial district. Over the next few years, as dance bars and disco music replaced the old-world charm of mujras, kathak and thumri, the tawaifs began to abandon the profession. Rekhabai, a courtesan, found herself at a crossroads, facing an uncertain future. Where should she go? What should she do next?

Originally from the Kanjarbhat tribe, Rekhabai was sold and trained as a tawaif while she was still a child. In the 1980s, when kothas were no longer recognized as centres for aesthetics, and society disapproved of the tawaif’s art, as they felt it was sex work in the guise of adakari (performance), Rekhabai made a name for herself in Calcutta and Bombay as a singing-dancing star. It was an era when she had to dodge guns, goons and Ghalib’s ghazals to carve out her own destiny, provide for her large family and raise her son in an English-medium boarding school.

In this poignant memoir, she narrates the unbelievable story of her survival to her son with candour, grace and humour, never missing a beat and always full of heart.

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Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems by Shikha Malviya

Anandibai Joshee (1865-87) was not only India’s first female physician, but also the first Indian woman to travel across the forbidden ‘black waters’ and pursue an education in the United States – with the help of a kind American ally.

The poems in Shikha Malaviya’s Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems are a chronological rendering of Anandibai’s life-from her birth and childhood in the bustling town of Kalyan in Maharashtra and her marriage to an eccentric man sixteen years older, to early childbirth and the loss of her infant, from which her desire to become a doctor was born.

With elegance and a stark beauty, these poems bring to life the struggles and accomplishments of a woman who travelled across the seas to pursue a medical education before her return to India as a doctor. While her adventures were cut short by tragedy, her story lives on through these poems that thunder from across the decades with a voice that cannot be silenced.

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Biographies & Autobiography Books in Hindi

Here’s a list of some biography books that have been translated to Hindi to enable larger readership. So, take your pick! Read these memoir books in Hindi or English.

Gujarmal Modi – Sahsi Udyogpati by Sonu Bhasin & Dheeraj Kumar Agarwal

The year was 1932, and a young man had just been banished from the state of Patiala. His crime? He had refused a glass of wine in the celebratory party at the Patiala Palace. It had not mattered to the maharaja that the man was a teetotaller.

The ban proved to be a boon as the thirty-year-old left Patiala and created one of the largest business empires in India. Looking for a new location to set up his factory, Gujarmal zeroed in on a sleepy village, Begumabad, on the outskirts of Delhi. It is here that the seeds of the Modi Group were sown. Starting with a sugar mill, he established a conglomerate with businesses including tyres, textiles, copy machines, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, oil and steel, to name a few.

This is the story of a resolute, ambitious young man who saw adversity as an opportunity and went on to create history. In the process, he set up some of the finest factories, created an industrial town that was way ahead of its time, generated large-scale employment and gave Indian manufacturing new wings. Gujarmal’s ten per cent allocation from earnings towards social responsibility, long before it became a corporate buzzword, and human resource initiatives became benchmarks in the history of Indian business.

A treasure trove of learnings for modern-day entrepreneurs, this book celebrates the man and his vision, grit, determination and spirit of entrepreneurship.

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Ye Jeevan Khel Mein by Girish Karnad, Srinath Perur & Madhu Joshi

Girish Karnad was one of modern India’s greatest cultural figures: an accomplished actor, a path-breaking director, an innovative administrator, a clear-headed and erudite thinker, a public intellectual with an unwavering moral compass, and above all, the most extraordinarily gifted playwright of his times.

Ye Jeevan Khel Mein, the Hindi translation of Karnad’s memoirs, This Life at Play, covers the first half of his remarkable life – from his childhood in Sirsi and his early engagement with local theatre, his education in Dharwad, Bombay and Oxford, to his career in publishing, his successes and travails in the film industry, and his personal and writerly life.

Moving and humorous, insightful and candid, these memoirs provide an unforgettable glimpse into the life-shaping experiences of a towering genius, and a unique window into the India in which he lived and worked.

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Udaan: Air Deccan ka Safar by Capt. G R Gopinath

This is the journey of a boy born in a remote village, who went from riding a bullock cart to owning an airline, a journey of an entrepreneur who built India’s first and largest low-cost airline Filled with rich anecdotes of everyday struggles and joys, this is the awe-inspiring story of Captain G.R. Gopinath. This autobiography narrates in gritty detail Captain Gopinath’s incredible journey: quitting the Indian Army in the late 1970s with a princely gratuity of Rs 6500, going back to his farm land inundated by the river, converting a piece of barren land to set up a farm for ecologically sustainable silkworm rearing, winning the Rolex award for it, his loves and passions, his extraordinary determination to launch an airline (which touched a crazy market cap of US$ 1.1 billion in less than four years ), in the process rewriting aviation history.

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Ritu Nanda by Sathya Saran

Meet Ritu Nanda. As Raj Kapoor’s daughter, she was part of the first family of Bollywood. Her marriage to Rajan Nanda of the Escorts Group led to her joining another illustrious family. Yet, she went on to carve her own identity as an insurance advisor and even got her name into the Guinness Book of World Records.

Ritu Nanda: Fir Bhi Rahenge Nishaniyan is the story of a woman who shed her shyness and stepped into the limelight, taking on a variety of roles – entrepreneur, insurance advisor, author, negotiator and pioneer. It’s about her quiet determination, grace and courage as she lived every moment to its fullest, even while battling a dreaded disease, and touched the lives of everyone around her. It’s also about those who added colour to the kaleidoscope of her life – her family, friends, colleagues and well-wishers.

With tributes from her sambandhi Amitabh Bachchan, family members Randhir Kapoor, Rima Jain, Kareena Kapoor and Ranbir Kapoor, as well as friends such as Karan Johar, Sonali Bendre, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Gauri Khan and many others, this is the story of a woman like no other. Meet Ritu Nanda. You will be happy you did.

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Ek Sadharan Si Zindagi: Har Peedhi ki Gatha by Ashok Lavasa

The world consists mainly of ordinary people leading simple lives. Their stories remain unheard as they haven’t been written about. But their lives inspire because they are a vindication of certain lasting values that survive in every society and keep us connected with the unseen forces that govern us.

In Ek Sadharan Si Zindagi, the Hindi translation of An Ordinary Life, former Election Commissioner of India Ashok Lavasa tells one such warm story. He weaves the experiences of his father, Udai Singh, into the narrative of a fast-changing India to show how his Bauji’s principles served as a moral compass in his life – and can in ours too. Through a series of incidents, he explores the virtues of honest living and illustrates that it is possible to prosper in a world of rising aspirations and cut-throat competition while preserving one’s ideals.

Reflective and philosophical, Ek Sadharan Si Zindagi is imbued with the grounded wisdom of an earlier Indian generation and its way of life, which is both ordinary and extraordinary, unique and universal at the same time.

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Woh Jo Hain by Meghna Gulzar

‘Papi says it is wrong of parents to presume that they know better, or know more than their child does. They may be biologically older than their child, but in their experience as parents, they’re of the same age. So if I was his two-year-old daughter, he was my two-year-old father. And we were both learning and evolving together — he as my father and me as his daughter.’ All of us know Gulzar as a film-maker, screenplay and dialogue writer, lyricist par excellence, author and poet. Woh Jo Hain… presents a facet of the icon that none of us are aware of — as a father. In iridescent prose, his daughter, Meghna, documents his life, revealing the man behind the legend: in every way a hands-on father, who prepared her for school without fail every day, braiding her hair and tying her shoelaces, and who despite his busy career in cinema, always made it a point to end his workday at 4 p.m. because her school ended at that time, and who wrote a book for her birthday every year till she was thirteen. From her earliest memories of waking up in the morning to the strains of him playing the sitar to him writing the songs for her films now, Meghna presents an intimate portrait of a father who indulged her in every way and yet raised her to be independent and confident of the choices she made. She also records his phenomenal creative oeuvre, the many trials and tribulations of his personal and professional life, through all of which she remained a priority. Beautifully designed and illustrated with never-before-seen photographs, Woh Jo Hain… offers an incredible insight into the bond between a father and a daughter.

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Other Memoir Books and True Stories

Hindi and Indian biography books are not all that we have for you! Here are some international memoir books and true stories.

From tales of resilience to heartwarming accounts of love, these stories offer a glimpse into the human history.

City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh by Zeyad Masroor Khan

Zeyad Masroor Khan was four years old when he realized that an innocent act of clicking a switch near a window overlooking the street could trigger a riot. As the distant thud of a crowd grew closer and calls for murder rent the air, he got his first taste of growing up in Upar Kot, a Muslim ghetto in Aligarh. Khan’s world was far-removed from the Aligarh of popular imagination-of poets, tehzeeb and the intellectual corridors of the Aligarh Muslim University. His was a city where serpentine lanes simmered with violence, homes fervently prayed to dispel the omnipresent fear of a family member turning up dead, and the soft breeze that blew over crowded terraces carried rumours of a bloodthirsty mob on the prowl.

In his coming-of-age memoir, Khan writes, with searing honesty and raw power, about the undercurrents of religious violence and the ensuing ‘othering’ that followed him everywhere he went: from his schooldays in Aligarh, when hopping over to the lending library to the ‘Hindu’ part of town to find his favourite comic book or lighting candles with neighbours on Diwali was fraught with tension; through his years as a college student in Delhi, where being denied apartments because of his name was the norm; to ultimately becoming a journalist documenting history of his country as it happened.

City on Fire is a rare, visceral portrait of how everyday violence and hate become a part of our lives and consciousness; a society where name and clothes mark out a person as the ‘other’. It is as much an incisive examination of religion and violence, imagined histories and fractured realities, grief and love in today’s India, as it is a paean to the hope of continued unity, to an idea of India.

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Gurkha Brotherhood by Kailash Limbu

‘Sometimes my mind reaches back, beyond the far and the arid landscapes of war, to memories of childhood that fill me with happiness and laughter.’

Considered to be among the finest infantrymen in the world, the Gurkhas are proud, brave warriors who have seen combat across the globe. In five tours of active service in Afghanistan that involved dangerous resupply missions and offensive patrols that took them to the heart of the ‘killing zone’, Captain Kailash Limbu and his men of the 2nd Battalion Royal Gurkha Rifles came under frequent attack from Taliban fighters. Captain Limbu lost several friends and colleagues from the close-knit Gurkha brotherhood, and on many occasions feared he himself would not live to see the end of the day. His means of coping with the trauma of conflict was to travel back to his childhood in a remote Himalayan village in Nepal. But even there, amid the simplicity of mountain life, danger and tragedy lurked…

In this searingly honest memoir, Captain Limbu celebrates his Gurkha heritage, relates remarkable stories of courage, and confronts demons that have shaped but not broken him.

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House Of Gucci: The Âmovie Tie-inã by Sara G. Forden

The sensational true story of murder, madness, glamour, and greed that shook the Gucci dynasty, now fully updated with a new afterword.

On March 27, 1995, Maurizio Gucci, heir to the fabulous fashion dynasty, was slain by an unknown gunman as he approached his Milan office. In 1998, his ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani Martinelli–nicknamed “The Black Widow” by the press–was sentenced to 29 years in prison, for arranging his murder.

Did Patrizia murder her ex-husband because his spending was wildly out of control? Did she do it because her glamorous ex was preparing to marry his mistress, Paola Franchi? Or is there a possibility she didn’t do it at all?

The Gucci story is one of glitz, glamour, intrigue, the rise, near fall and subsequent resurgence of a fashion dynasty. Beautifully written, impeccably researched, and widely acclaimed, The House of Gucci will captivate readers with its page-turning account of high fashion, high finance, and heart-rending personal tragedy.

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