Manjula Padmanabhan (born 1953) is a playwright, journalist, comic strip artist, and children's book author responsible for the play Harvest. She has also written such plays as Lights Out! (1984),Hidden Fires(solo by Rashi Bunny) The Artist's Model (1995) and Sextet (1996).
Born in Delhi to a diplomat family in 1953, she went to boarding school in her teenage years. After college her determination to make her own way in life led to various kind of works in publishing and media related fields
She has authored a collection of short stories, called Kleptomania. Her most recent book, published in 2008, is titled "Escape".
Apart from writing newspaper columns she also created comic strips She created Suki, an Indian female comic character, which was serialized as a strip in Sunday Observer. Before 1997 (the year in which her play Harvest was staged) she was better known as cartoonist and had a daily cartoon strip in The Pioneer newspaper.