MK Raghavendra is a film scholar and critic. He received the National Award for Best Film Critic in 1997 and was awarded a Homi Bhabha Fellowship in 2000-2001. He has authored four volumes of academic film scholarship criticism - Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema , Bipolar Identity: Region, Nation and the Kannada Language Film , The Politics of Hindi Cinema in the New Millennium: Bollywood and the Anglophone Indian Nation , and Locating World Cinema: Interpretations of Film as Culture . He has also written two books on cinema for the general reader: 50 Indian Film Classics and Director's Cut: 50 Film-makers of the Modern Era . His essays on Indian cinema find a place in Indian and international anthologies. He has also published extensively in Indian newspapers, periodicals and journals like The Indian Review of Books , Caravan , Economic and Political Weekly , Frontline, The Book Review and Biblio: A Review of Books . His writing has been translated into French, Polish and Russian. He has edited an anthology of writing on South Indian cinema, Beyond Bollywood : The Cinemas of South India , published in 2017. His book The Oxford India Short Introduction to Bollywood was published in 2016. He is the founder-editor of the online journal Phalanx, which is dedicated to debate.