Salil Tripathi was born in Bombay, India. For many years a correspondent in India, Singapore and Hong Kong for publications including India Today and Far Eastern Economic Review, he moved to London in 1999. He is a contributing editor at Mint and at Caravan in India. In the UK, with novelist Kamila Shamsie, he co-chairs the Writers-at-Risk Committee of English PEN. In November 2011, he won the third prize at the Bastiat Awards for Journalism about free societies, in New York. He is also on the board of English PEN.

Salil has written for a wide range of newspapers and journals internationally, including India Today, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Wall Street Journal, and the International Herald Tribune, and has been a senior visiting fellow for business and human rights at the Kennedy School, Harvard University, and is also an adviser to several global initiatives involving business and human rights. He graduated from the University of Bombay and later obtained his Masters in Business Administration from the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College in the United States.

Offence: The Hindu Case, about the rise of Hindu nationalism and its implications on free expression, is his first book. Currently, he is working on several book projects – one a collection of travel essays, another, with Devangshu Datta, on a corporate scandal in India, and one on the Bangladesh war of liberation and its aftermath.