Anand Neelakantan is one of India’s top selling authors with more than 15 books to his credit. Anand is also a columnist, screenwriter, and public speaker. He is known for writing mythological fiction and has authored fourteen books in English and one in Malayalam. He has also written screenplays for popular television series in Hindi on various GEC and OTT platforms. He has been writing a column named Acute Angle in the New Indian Express since 2017. Anand has acted in two Advertisement films and has also played the role of the antagonist Ettappa Naicker in the Doordarshan Television show Swaraj. He follows the style of telling stories based on the perspective of the antagonists or supporting characters of a larger work.

His debut work Asura: Tale of the Vanquished (2012) was based on the Indian epic Ramayana, told from the perspective of Ravana—the first book in his Ramayana series. It was followed by series of books based on characters from Mahabharata and Baahubali. His books have been translated to different languages such as Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Assamese, English, Sinhalese, Burmese and Indonesian. Anand has written screenplays for popular Hindi television serials like Siya Ke Ram in Star TV, Mahabali Hanuman in SONY TV, Chakravarthy Ashoka in Colors TV, Sarfarosh in Netflix, Swaraj in DD National, Srimad Ramayan in Sony TV etc. He has written the story for the OTT series TAJ in Zee5.

Asura was featured in the list of “100 books by Indian authors to read in a lifetime” by Amazon Books editors. The book has sold more than a million copies across the years. Three of his books have been shortlisted for Crossword Book Award during the respective years. He was listed as one among the “100 top celebrities in India” in 2015 and 2017 by Forbes India. Anand also writes a column for The New Indian Express on current affairs and his fortnightly column is called “Acute Angle”. Anand’s debut non-fiction book- The Asura way was published in January 2024 by Jaico books.