User:Shivsinghpune/sandbox/Draft Akhilesh Panigrahi

Akhilesh Panigrahi
Akhilesh Panigrahi is the author of the national best selling book ‘Story Shots & Poetry Pints’. He hails from a Bollywood family and is the nephew of Filmfare award winning art director Sukant Panigrahy. He draws his inspiration to write from a long lost true love and myriad experiences in life, right from facing the flak from his family for not cracking the engineering entrance to following his dreams and winning national-level awards, selection in the IT giant IBM at the age of 19, writing for a popular newspaper ‘The Statesman’ and garnering appreciation from Bollywood directors for his screenwriting as well as dialogue writing knack. He is currently working on a few Bollywood film screenplays.

Early Life
Akhilesh was born in Rourkela, a peaceful and lush green city in northern Odisha to a middle class family. He completed his schooling from the St. Paul’s School in Rourkela and joined the KIIT University in Bhubaneswar for a management course. He got selected at MIT Pune to continue his studies from the second year of his graduation. He moved to Pune thereby pursuing his big fat Bollywood dream to become a celebrated screenwriter. After getting appreciation from Bollywood’s elite directors like Mahesh Bhatt, Rajkumar Hirani, E Niwas, Anurag Basu and Neeraj Pandey for his fantastic dialogue and screenwriting skills. He also writes regularly for the popular newspaper ‘The Statesman’.

Awards and recognition
He received awards from Bollywood dignitaries Shabana Azmi and Om Puri for screenwriting at various national level literature festivals like Think Literature, Bhubaneswar and the Apeejay Kolkata Literature Festival.