Tanika Gupta

Tanika Gupta, MBE (Bengali: তানিকা গুপ্তা; born 1 December 1963) is an English playwright of Bengali descent. Apart from her work for the theatre, she has also written scripts for television and radio plays.

As a child, Gupta performed Tagore dance dramas with her parents. Her mother Gairika Gupta was an Indian classically trained dancer, and her father Tapan Gupta was a singer. She is also related to the Indian revolutionary Dinesh Gupta, whose brother was Tanika's grandfather.

After attending Mill Hill School in London, Gupta graduated from Oxford University with a Modern History degree. After Oxford, her political commitment found expression in her work for an Asian women's refuge in Manchester. In 1988, she married David Archer an anti-poverty activist and ActionAid's current Head of Programme Development, whom she met at university. She and her husband then moved to London where Gupta was a community worker in Islington, writing in her spare time.

The Waiting Room (2000) was a career highpoint, enjoyed by blue-rinses as well as by Asian audiences. Gupta is rumoured to be writing a new play for Birmingham Repertory Theatre's Youth Theatre, The Young REP, to be performed in June 2009. She is currently writing a play for the Young Rep, for a group called Plays and New Writing. In 2013, her play The Empress, about Abdul Karim and Queen Victoria opened in Stratford upon Avon.

For the BBC's Grange Hill series, Gupta wrote seven episodes between 1997 and 2000.

In 2008, Gupta was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours for her services to drama. In June 2016 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2018, Gupta was awarded with the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Drama for her play Lions and Tigers.

• EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award for Best Television Production) (screenplay) "Flight" (1998)
• John Whiting Award "The Waiting Room" (2000)
• Asian Women of Achievement Award (Arts and Culture category) (2003)
• EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award for Best Play) (adaptation) "Hobson's Choice" (2004)
• Laurence Olivier Nomination for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre "Fragile Land"/"Hobson's Choice" (2004)
• Amnesty International UK Media Awards (radio play) "Chitra" (2005)
• Member of the Order of the British Empire in the Birthday Honours (2008)
• BBC Audio Drama Award for Best Adaptation "A Doll's House" (2013)
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (2016)

Gupta and her husband have two daughters, Nandini (born 1991), Niharika (born 1993) and a son Malini (born 2000).