Dhiruben Gordhanbhai Patel (29 May 1926 – 10 March 2023) was one of the major figures of twentieth-century Gujarati letters — a novelist, playwright, poet and translator whose work is shaped by Gandhian ideals and returns repeatedly to women's lives and the search for selfhood. Born in Vadodara to a Bombay Chronicle journalist and a Congress political activist, she grew up in Santacruz and read English at Bhavan's College, Mumbai, taking her B.A. in 1945 and her M.A. in 1949, and went on to teach English literature there.

She founded the publishing house Kalki Prakashan in the early 1960s, edited the Gujarati journal Sudha from 1966 to 1975, and served as president of the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad in 2003–04. She published more than fifty books — the novels Vadavanal (1963), Andhali Gali (1983) and Agantuk (1996) among them — and wrote the play Bhavni Bhavai (1961), which Ketan Mehta turned into his landmark 1980 film. Agantuk won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Gujarati in 2001 and appeared in English as Rainbow at Noon. Her other honours include the Ranjitram Suvarna Chandrak (1980), the K. M. Munshi Suvarna Chandrak (1981) and the Sahitya Gaurav Puraskar (2002).

Much of her later work was for children and young adults, including the much-loved play Anderi Gunderi Tipari Ten and Gujarati translations of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and it is that strand Ideas Unlimited has staged most. Manoj Shah's company presented her Agantuk in 2003, Mummy Tu Aavi Kevi for the summer children's festival at Prithvi Theatre in 2010, and Pai Pai in 2015 — a comedy about teenagers convinced their parents are holding out on them, written, as its poster puts it, for children aged six to a hundred and six. She died in Ahmedabad in March 2023, aged ninety-six.