I Am on the Hit List: Murder and Myth-Making in South India

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Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize 2025

On 5 September 2017, the fierce journalist and activist Gauri Lankesh was assassinated outside her home in Bangalore, leaving the city’s close-knit community of writers and activists stunned and grieving. A shocked nation reacted with spontaneous mass protests. Her murder and its aftermath continue to make headlines even years later, and her killers are yet to be brought to book.

As journalist Rollo Romig follows the trail of Gauri’s life and death, and the investigation that followed, he unravels a world of political extremists, fearless writers, organised crime and shadowy religious groups. I Am on the Hit List is an epic narrative that moves between the many bookshops of Church Street and brand-new high rises funded by IT wealth, to a secretive ashram in Goa and the kitchens of an international vegetarian restaurant chain, even stopping to consider the story of St Thomas’s martyrdom in India two thousand years ago. As much an interrogation of the cycle of polarisation and bloodshed that inspires political murder as it is an ode to the courage and vulnerability of those who are fighting the decline of democracy in India and around the world, this is a stunning, unsettling narrative.