Bio

Richard C. Morais is an award-winning financial journalist and novelist. He is best known as the author of the New York Times and international bestseller The Hundred-Foot Journey, a culinary novel that follows the life of an Indian chef as he conquers the rarified world of French haute cuisine. In 2014, Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey released The Hundred-Foot Journey as a film starring Helen Mirren and Om Puri.

His novel The Man with No Borders is the story of an aristocratic Spanish private banker living in Switzerland and coming to terms with his life. It is published globally by Amazon’s literary imprint, Little A, and is being developed as a feature film. His sophomore novel Buddhaland Brooklyn, about a Japanese Buddhist priest building a temple in Brooklyn, is in development as a premium TV series. Mr. Morais is also the author of the critically acclaimed biography Pierre Cardin: The Man Who Became a Label, and he serves as an Executive Producer on all the film and television projects of his works in development.

Mr. Morais has also had a distinguished journalism career. He was the editor who built Barron’s Penta, an acclaimed glossy magazine for wealthy families, and before that he was Forbes’s European Bureau Chief, the business magazine’s longest-serving foreign correspondent. His brief at Forbes allowed him to travel anywhere in the world and to write on any subject that interested him. His unusual business stories – from a controversial interview with Prime Minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street to his profile of the low-key Indian billionaire Adi Godrej – led to multiple journalism awards. His firm RCM Media has since developed a unique private-equity approach to literary partnerships with the business community, and he currently has two nonfiction books in development that he is co-authoring with prominent Wall Street figures.

Mr. Morais has uniquely won three awards and six nominations at the Business Journalist of the Year Awards, the only competition in the world where the best U.S. and British business journalists competed directly in a single event. His fictional works, meanwhile, were semifinalists or shortlisted for multiple literary awards both in the U.S. and abroad. Mr. Morais was the proud founder and host of the 2023 Rainbow Railroad “Road to Freedom” Literary Festival in New York City, and in 2015 he was named Citizen Diplomat of the Year – the highest honor granted by Global Ties U.S., a private-public partnership sponsored by the U.S. State Department – “for promoting cross-cultural understanding in all of his literary work.”