ANGELA SAINI was born in the UK in 1980. She has a masters degree in engineering from Oxford University and a second masters in science and security from the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London. An independent science journalist based in London, she has written for New Scientist, Wired, The Economist and leading scientific journals in the UK and the US. Her first television science documentary aired in November 2008, and she can be regularly heard reporting on technology issues for the BBC World Service radio show ‘Digital Planet’. She was named European Young Science Writer of the Year in 2009, and in 2008 won a European television news award for her report of a major investigation, which was aired on ‘BBC News at Ten’ and ‘BBC World News’. A bilingual English and Hindi speaker, she previously worked in India for The Hindu newspaper group.

Links
Angela Saini's website
Angela Saini's blog

GEEK NATION
How Indian Citizens are Creating the World’s Next Science Superpower

According to a report in October 2009 from Thomson Reuters, India’s science research productivity will be on par with most G8 nations within 7 to 8 years and could overtake them between 2015 and 2020. At the dawn of this scientific revolution, GEEK NATION delves inside the psyche of India’s science-hungry citizens, exploring India’s commitment to science and technology, its importance to India’s growth, and the culture that underlies it.

Through firsthand reportage and probing analysis, it explains how a spiritual nation squares its soul with hard rationality, and what this transformation means for the rest of the world (already a third of the software engineers in Silicon Valley are of Indian descent, while Bill Gates estimates that Indians constitute upwards of 20 per cent of Microsoft's engineering work force – astonishing numbers for an ethnic group that according to Wikipedia makes up only 2.7 per cent of the US population).

An eye-opening book packed with curious, colourful characters and gripping stories, GEEK NATION takes readers from the schools and colleges that produce India’s science graduates, to the companies and organisations that hire them, and the big governmental projects that promise to propel India into superpower status – awakening us all to this 'sleeping giant' of geeks.

Publisher: Hodder (UK)
Delivery: 1 November 2010
Publication: Spring 2011
Status: Proposal and sample chapter
Length: 100,000 words

World rights: Hodder

For international rights contact Rupert Lancaster at Hodder