Deepa Balsavar was born in a city known as Bombay. She had an idyllic childhood where no one went for tutions, everyone knew everyone in the lane and vacations were spent in one’s native place. Books were borrowed from the local lending library and holidays were characterised by lazy reading with feet in sun and head in shade.

She completed most of her education in Bombay and now continues to live and work in Mumbai. Most of her professional life has been spent developing material for educational programmes. For 20 years Deepa has worked with the Avehi-Abacus Project that has created teaching-learning kits for municipal schools. She has also illustrated textbooks for NCERT and material for maths and reading programmes sponsored by UNICEF in Jharkhand and Chhatisgarh.

Among other projects, she has written scripts for Meena, the animated heroine of UNICEF’s empowerment series for children and developed facilitation guidelines and children’s activity material for the same series.

Deepa enjoys teaching and has conducted workshops on developing visual material and on writing animation material for Meena.

She has written and illustrated a number of books and stories for Tulika and she is particularly proud of her storybook ‘The Seed’ and her illustrations for the Thumb Thumb series of books.

When she was young, Deepa wanted to grow up and live with wild lions in Africa. Now she has somewhat modified her expectations and would be happy to grow old surrounded by books, children and animals (though frequent trips to places where wild beasts roam are not to be given up on).

Deepa shares her home with Tara, her beautiful mermaid daughter, and her kohl-eyed honey Hasu, the dog who tries so hard to understand her every word.