Official Bio
Ruchira Gupta is an Emmy-winning journalist and founder of Apne Aap, an anti-trafficking organization that supports women and girls in exiting systems of prostitution. Her latest novel, The Freedom Seeker, is a powerful social justice adventure for young readers. It follows her acclaimed debut I Kick and I Fly, which received the Malka Penn Award for Human Rights in Children’s Literature and the South Asia Book Award.
An internationally recognized activist, Ruchira played a key role in the creation of the UN Trust Fund for Trafficking Survivors and the passage of the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act. She has received honors including the French Ordre National du Mérite, the Clinton Global Citizen Award, and the UN NGO CSW Woman of Distinction Award. She holds an honorary doctorate from Smith College.
Ruchira has worked with the United Nations across Nepal, Thailand, Kosovo, Iran, and the United States, and she teaches occasionally at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs. She has co-authored As If Women Matter with Gloria Steinem and edited the anthologies River of Flesh and Renu’s Letters to Birju Babu.
She lives between New York and Forbesganj, where she continues her activism—and paints in her late mother’s garden.
My Story
For as long as I can remember, my father told me bedtime stories and so I wanted to be a storyteller just like him. I wanted to write stories about girls who fix problems. I was ten years old when the school magazine published my article titled - The Autobiography of a Pencil. I immediately resolved to become a journalist. I didn’t have much interest in going to college but the newspaper I wanted to work at in Kolkata refused to give me a job without a degree. So, I started going to college in the daytime and to work in the evenings. While on a work assignment in Nepal, I stumbled upon rows of villages with missing girls. I asked the villagers where all the girls were, and the answer changed my life. I found that little girls, as young as twelve years old, were smuggled across the border and sold to brothels in India. As a journalist, I had covered famine and conflict in the past, but I had never witnessed such intimate violence and on such a scale. I related the story of some of these women in a documentary called The Selling of Innocents, and won an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. Still, I knew there was more work to do. So, I quit journalism and started an NGO, Apne Aap, inside the red-light areas of India and began to work with the United Nations all over the world. Slowly but surely, I became part of a global movement against sex-trafficking, striving to create a world wherein no human being is bought or sold.
I have won many awards and made many friends along the way, but I know that my work is far from finished. I wrote I Kick and I Fly in order to inspire young adults and share the movement them. I am certain that reading my book will achieve that. I am still happiest when I can curl up in a corner with a book or take a walk with my dog.
