Mahtab attended the J.B. Petit High School for Girls in Mumbai where she fell in love with books. Most of her recesses were spent reading in nooks and corners of the school building with interesting friends like Lucy Pevensie, Charlie Bucket, and Pippi Longstocking.

After graduating with a degree in Commerce from the University of Bombay, Mahtab decided to pursue Hotel Management. She spent two years training at the Oberoi School of Hotel Management in Delhi before transferring to Mumbai to work at Oberoi Towers. She was the Front Office Manager which gave her the opportunity to meet lots of interesting people and work under tremendous pressure, especially during the holiday season when the hotel was full. Not entirely happy with the hotel industry, Mahtab worked in the credit card industry as well as IT recruitment, after she immigrated to Canada. This last turned out to be toughest of them all and Mahtab was adrift in an alphabet soup for months. It was a steep learning curve and often, she wanted to give up. But she didn’t. The work ethics cultivated in her previous jobs served her well and helped her climb to the top of the professional ladder.

Writing, her fifth and final career, has been the most rewarding. It started with a humble diary in 2004, about life back home in Mumbai and morphed into the beginning of The Third Eye—the first book in the Tara Trilogy. There were lots of rejections before she got published. She met each of these rejections armed with a positive attitude, and chocolate. Lots of it. After four years of persevering, The Third Eye was published in 2007 and won the Silver Birch Fiction Award in 2009. Mahtab hasn’t looked back since.

Mahtab continues to learn the art and craft of writing. One of the many highlights of this career was being a guest host on the Writing Excuses podcast with Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Howard Taylor, and Mary Robinette Kowal.

She has spoken at numerous conferences across Canada and her favourite, to date, is the Surrey International Writers Conference where you’ll find her teaching or attending.

Mahtab moved to British Columbia and has embraced the outdoors and hiking. Even though she finds it incredibly hard, she perseveres. This one was taken at the Jurassic Ridge in Squamish.