Pranay Lal is a biochemist by training and works for a non-profit organisation on public health. He has been a caricaturist for newspapers, an animator for an advertising agency and an environmental campaigner. His first book, Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent, was published in December 2016. It won the best non-fiction debut award at the Tata Lit Fest in Mumbai in 2017, best book award at the Delhi Book Fair 2017 and was named among the top 10 memorable books of the year by Amazon.