Manasi Subramaniam has spent over seventeen years in international trade publishing. Until December 2025, she was Editor-in-Chief and Vice-President at Penguin Random House India. In that role, she led literary publishing across five literary imprints: Hamish Hamilton, Allen Lane, Viking, Penguin Classics, Penguin. She oversaw fiction, non-fiction and translation. During her publishing career, she edited and published writers whose work received major international recognition, including the Booker Prize, International Booker Prize, Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Women’s Prize and leading Indian literary awards. Her publishing work included politically and culturally contested books, as well as large-scale translation programmes from Indian languages.

Alongside her executive roles in publishing, she has maintained a significant public and institutional presence through writing, speaking and teaching internationally. She was a Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellow at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University, a Fisher Family Summer Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies) at Stanford University, a Raisina Young Fellow at the Raisina Dialogue and has been selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

She currently works across cultural institutions, universities, foundations and policy-adjacent environments, drawing on long experience in institutional leadership, editorial decision-making and the governance of cultural organisations.