Shyam Madhavan Sarada, aka Greystroke™, has been a writer and illustrator of children’s books and stories for over 25 years, and began his professional illustrator’s career as the cartoonist for the erstwhile literary review magazine Indian Review of Books in 1995. Since then, his work has been published by leading publishers, including Tulika, Penguin, Hachette, Pratham Books, Tara, Karadi Tales, Macmillan, Pages4ages, Khaleej Times, and most recently, 1InchMargin, a publishing house and hybrid content srtudio he co-founded in 2020. His book Wailers Three, published by Pratham Books, is a CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) recommended reader for English for Kendriya Vidyalayas. A brief bibliography can be found on Goodreads.

He is also the art director for Melting Pot, a content & design house, and was part of the team behind the award-winning Mahindra newsletter, Skyline. He also served as the art director for the children’s magazines Chatterbox, Quest, Junior Quest, Hoot and Toot, between 1999 and 2013, for which he has illustrated over 250 stories and written several. Chatterbox was published by Wheitstone Productions, a company he co-founded in 1998 (later acquired by Educomp Solutions during the dotcom boom in the early 2000s).

In addition to his work in publishing, he is also a photographer and filmmaker. He takes credit for having produced and directed Onan (2009), India’s first full-length guerrilla feature film. A brief filmography can be found on IMDb. His recent work includes producing author/illustrator interviews for literary review site www.goodbooks.in in association with the Parag Trust, several of which can be found here. He recently featured on the National Geographic Channel on the photography reality show No Filter by IndiGo (Season 1, Episode 3).

Apart from the above, he is a founder-partner at Funky Rainbow, a leading independent retailer of Indian children’s books. You can connect with him on Facebook. By way of formal education, he is an MBA (Marketing & Advertising) from the Pondicherry Central University (Class of 1994), and has a BSc degree in Zoology.