Vikram Sampath is the author of three acclaimed books of non-fiction: ‘Splendours of Royal Mysore: the untold story of the Wodeyars’, ‘My name is Gauhar Jaan! : the life and times of a musician’ and ‘Voice of the Veena: S. Balachander, abiography’. The book on Gauhar Jaan won him several laurels, including India’s National Academy of Letters, the Sahitya Akademi’s first Yuva Puraskar in English literature and the Association of Recorded Sound Companies (ARSC) International Award for Excellence in Historical Research in New York. The book has been adapted to a play directed by Lillette Dubey and written by Mahesh Dattani. Vikram was among four artists and writers to be selected for the prestigious Residential Programme at the Rashtrapati Bhawan by the Honourable President of India.

Vikram is an Electronics Engineer and Mathematician from BITS-Pilani, an MBA in Finance from SP Jain, Mumbai and is finishing his PhD in Music History from the University of Queensland, Australia. He has worked in several leading multinational companies like GE Money, Citibank and Hewlett Packard, the Government of India’s Ministry of Culture where he headed the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) and as the Director of Symbiosis School of Media and Communication (SSMC).

Vikram has established India’s first digital sound archive for preservation of vintage gramophone records of the country called the Archive of Indian Music (AIM) and co-founded India’s second largest literary conclave, the Bangalore Literature Festival (BLF) in 2012. He is currently a Fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Programme, has been a visiting Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study) in Berlin, and serves on several Government bodies like the Karnataka Knowledge Commission, Karnataka Tourism Vision Group, Sam Pitroda Commission on national archives and Prasar Bharati core committee on archives. He is also a member of the International Society for Music Education (ISME) and one of the representatives of India in this group. A trained Carnatic vocalist under several eminent gurus such as Vid. D V Nagaraj, Smt. Bombay Jayashri and Dr. Jayanthi Kumaresh, he writes regularly for newspapers and magazines.