"Ashok Banker," a.k.a. "Ashok K. Banker", is the former pen name of an Irish-Indian author active from 1992 to 2014. Under this pen name, he authored over 70 books, including over 60 national and international bestsellers and critically acclaimed and award-winning novels. His prolific output includes children's mystery, adventure and speculative fiction, romance, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, epic fantasy, horror, mythology and nonfiction. His last published work under this pen name was Ten Kings, published in 2014 and launched by the Indian superstar, Kamal Haasan. It remains his most successful work. From 2015 onwards, he ceased authoring new work under this pen name. New editions of older finished works continued appearing upto 2024. His last published works were the Burnt Empire Trilogy, the bestselling and award-winning children's books I Am Brown, Brown Girls Rule and Brown Boys Rule, and numerous award-winning short stories and novellas. Subsequently, he went on to publish under other pen names, finding success as the author of multiple bestselling American thriller, romance and nonfiction series. He now lives in the USA and has published over 90 books under various other pen names. He remains a very private person and no longer gives interviews or maintains any online or social media presence. If you have interacted with or been contacted by a social media or email account claiming to be Ashok, it is definitely a fake account.
Prior to becoming an author, he was an acclaimed, award-winning internationally published poet with documentaries about him aired on national and international television. His maiden collection, Ashes in the Dust of Time, represented Young India at the World Book Fair in Paris, 1979. He was 15 years old at the time. He went on to find success as a voice over narrator and voice actor, and was compared by critics to the likes of Ameen Sayani and Harish Bhimani, his childhood idols. He also sang professionally in the well-known Newman Choir conducted by Father J.B. Fernandes, and his voice appears on several published recordings. Simultaneously in his late teens and early twenties, he found success and fame as a marketing and advertising professional, and was credited for being one of the first pioneers of direct marketing and brand planning in India. Simultaneously, he also pursued a high-profile career as a journalist, columnist and news reporter, single-handedly breaking front-page news stories for The Times of India, Outlook, and The Week, and published over 2,150 pieces under his byline before moving on to the then-nascent field of television. He created and wrote, solo, the entire 262 episode run of India's first television series in English, A Mouthful of Sky, co-wrote Malaysia's first television series in English, as well as writing episodes of numerous shows ranging from the seminal Saanp Seedi to India's first female detective series, Saboot, India's first hospital soap Sanjivani, as well as on hit shows like Saans and Siski. His television writing career culminated with India's most watched historical series of all time, Chhattrapati Ashoka Samrat. He was credited on over 2,600 episodes of television at the time. He also worked as a highly sought after script doctor and ghostwriter, penning over two dozen Indian feature films in Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Telegu and Tamil and pseudonomously being awarded the National Award twice.
As an author, he is credited with pioneering English-language genre fiction in India, series fiction, fantasy fiction, science fiction, horror, and crime, mystery, detective and thriller fiction, among many other firsts. There are over 3.2 million copies of his books in print, in over 37 languages and 81 countries globally.
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