Born in Calcutta in 1953, Naveen Kishore received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature in 1973, and began working as a theatre lighting designer. He then established Seagull Books in 1982, a publishing programme in the arts and media focusing on drama, film, art, and culture studies. Today, it also publishes literature, including poetry and serious fiction, and owns the worldwide English-language publishing rights for books by Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Bernhard, Imre Kertész, Yves Bonnefoy, Mo Yan, Mahasweta Devi, Peter Handke, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, among many others. In 1987, Kishore set up the Seagull Foundation for the Arts as a non-profit charitable trust. The Seagull School of Publishing was set up under the auspices of the trust in 2012. Kishore is a photographer who has extensively documented female impersonators from Manipuri, Bengali and Punjabi theatre practices. He is also the recipient of the Goethe Medal and the Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.