A.R. VENKATACHALAPATHY, Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, has taught at universities in Tirunelveli, Chennai, Singapore and Chicago. Apart from the V.K.R.V. Rao Prize (History, 2007), he has received the Vilakku Pudumaippithan Award (2018) and Iyal Virudhu (2021), both for lifetime contribution to Tamil. He has published widely on the social, cultural and intellectual history of colonial Tamil Nadu. Apart from his scholarly writings in English, he has written/edited over 30 books in Tamil. His publications in English include The Brief History of a Very Big Book: The Making of the Tamil Encyclopaedia, Tamil Characters: Personalities, Politics, Culture; Who Owns That Song?: The Battle for Subramania Bharati’s Copyright; The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes, and Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu; In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History. Presently he is working on biographies of Periyar and V.O. Chidambaram Pillai.
Aanchal Malhotra is an artist, writer and oral historian living in Delhi. Her seminal research, titled Remnants of a Separation, is a material study of the Partition of India, based on objects that were carried across either side of the border during 1947. It began as a photographic archive and has been exhibited at various galleries across India, Canada and the UK, and digitally at the Google Cultural Institute. She is also the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory, a digital repository of material culture of the Indian subcontinent, tracing family histories and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles and objects of antiquity. She can be found at her photoblog, The Hiatus Project, which chronicles her love affair with the city of Delhi.
Adoor Gopalakrishnan is a graduate of the Film Institute of India, Pune, and has written and directed 12 feature films and more than two dozen nonfiction films. His films have been screened in all the major film festivals around the world, and he has been awarded the International Film Critics’ Prize six times successively. He received the British Film Institute (BFI) award for the Most Original and Imaginative film of 1982 for Elippathayam. In 2004, the French Government honoured him with the title Commander of the Order of Arts & Letters. He received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2005 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2006. He has also received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Cairo, Denver and New Jersey festivals; Hony D. Litts from the University of Kerala, Mahatma Gandhi University and Visva-Bharati; served on the juries of film festivals at Venice, Cairo, Fribourg, Singapore, Hawaii, Sochi, Shanghai and Goa and has published four books on theory and practice of cinema.
Aishwaryaa Rajinikanth is a film director and a start-up entrepreneur. She is a trained Bharatanatyam dancer and a voracious reader. In 2015, she set up Ten Entertainment, a digital media to promote short film content. Additionally she oversees the production activities of Wunderbar Films, a production company launched by her actor-husband Dhanush.
Akshay Manwani turned to freelance writing in 2009. He has since written on Indian cinema and popular culture for a variety of publications such as The Caravan, The Indian Quarterly, Scroll.in, Mint, Business Standard and Mumbai Mirror. Akshay’s first book was Sahir Ludhianvi: The People’s Poet (2013). In 2014, Akshay won the RedInk award for Best Lifestyle and Entertainment Story, given by the Press Club Mumbai, for his detailed feature on BR Chopra’s Mahabharata television series. Akshay lives with his daughter and wife in Mumbai.
Akshaya Mukul is a senior editor with The Times of India. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India, which won the Tata Prize, the Ramnath Goenka Award, the Atta Galatta Prize, the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and the Jury Award at the Crossword Book Awards.
Amandeep Sandhu hails from Odisha and is the author of two novels: Sepia Leaves (2008 Rupa) and Roll of Honour (2012, Rupa). His non-fiction work, Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines (Westland/Amazon, 2019) is part-reportage, part-memoir, part-contextual history. The book was long-listed for the NIF-Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Award 2020 and short-listed for the Atta Galatta-BLF Non-Fiction Prize 2020. His essays and short stories have appeared in various anthologies, magazines and websites. Amandeep was a Fellow, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany (2013 to 2015) and is currently a Homi Bhabha Fellow (2022-24) working on a book tentatively titled The Outliers: Sikhs Who Live Outside Panjab, In India. He lives in Bengaluru and writes for Caravan, Scroll, The Hindu and The Hindu BussinessLine.
AMRUTA PATIL is a writer and painter with an MFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is the author of graphic novels Kari (HarperCollins) and Adi Parva (HarperCollins). Adi Parva is the first part of a mytho-historical trilogy based on the Mahabharata. Live Mint has described hers as “the most original comic strip work...seen in India”. Amruta’s books have been translated into French and Italian, and her short works of graphic fiction have appeared in international magazines such as Art Review, TimeOut, Internazionale and Tehelka. View Amruta’s writing and artwork at amrutapatil.blogspot.com.
His short fiction has been translated into Chinese, French, German, Hebrew and Romanian. His debut YA novel, The Beast With Nine Billion Feet (2010), was short-listed for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword award. Along with Vandana Singh, he co-edited Breaking the Bow (2012), an anthology of speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana. His most recent work is Half Of What I Say (2015).
ANITA RATNAM is a celebrated performer of dance and theatre. As choreographer, writer, speaker and mentor her impact on the Indian performing arts has been recognised with awards and honours. As a culture catalyst, Anita’s work traverses a wide range — academia, youth outreach, motivational speaking and digital creation.
Anoothi Vishal is the author of Mrs LC’s Table: Stories on Kayasth Food and Culture. She is a columnist and food writer specialising in food history, culinary links between cultures and restaurant trends. Anoothi is also the founder of The Great Delhi Pop-up and curates culinary events to showcase regional and heritage Indian cuisines to a larger metropolitan audience.
Anupama Chandra is a film editor, director and teacher. She graduated with a diploma in film editing from the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, in 1997 and degrees in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford, the U K in 1995 and St. Stephen’s College, Delhi [1992]. Over the last seventeen years, she has worked as an editor on several documentary films. Her most recent work is about the life and work of Mythily Sivaraman, Fragments of a Past, with director and historian Uma Chakravarti; and her own directorial venture The Books We Made, which she co-directed with Uma Tanuku. She also teaches film editing and direction in workshops and co-curricular courses at schools and universities. She is visiting faculty for film editing for the Creative Documentary course at SACAC, New Delhi.
Anusha Yadav is a brand cultures consultant, portrait photographer, and a curator of online archives. A graduate of NID, Ahmedabad, in 2010, Anusha founded Indian Memory Project that traces a personal history of the Indian subcontinent through images found in personal archives. In 2013, she founded The Memory Company, a creative and curatorial consultancy, whose first international exhibit The Photograph is Proof on historical criminal investigations from India was shown at the Format International Photography Festival, 2015, the U K. Anusha’s awards include an International ‘Honorary mention’ at the Prix Ars Electronica 2013 awards, and Innovator of the Year at the India Today Women’s Summit, 2014. In August 2015, The New Yorker magazine invited her to showcase Indian Memory Project on Instagram.
Aruna Sairam is a Carnatic vocalist, composer, collaborator, humanitarian, and speaker. In addition to her performances in India, Aruna has taken Carnatic music to the global arena at prestigious venues including the Royal Albert Hall and Carnegie Hall. Currently Vice-Chairperson of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, Delhi, she was appointed as Advisor to the State Department of Culture in 2008 by the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. Aruna works for the musical education of underprivileged students, through the Nadayogam Trust, which she founded in 2011. Aruna was the first to incorporate abhang, a Western Indian musical form, into a traditional, South Indian concert. By interacting with national and international musicians, Aruna communicates beyond regional contexts, using melody as a language of human expression. Her many awards include the Padma Shri and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award.
“Arunava Sinha is a translator of classic and contemporary Bengali fiction. His latest published translations are The Chieftain’s Daughter by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Three Women by Rabindranath Tagore. His earlier translations include What Really Happened and Other Stories by Banaphool, By The Tungabhadra by Saradindu Bandyopadhyay, Striker Stopper by Moti Nandy, and My Kind of Girl by Buddhadeva Bose. His translation of Shankar’s Chowringhee won the Vodafone-Crossword Translation Prize in 2007 and was shortlisted for the Independent Best Foreign Fiction Prize in UK in 2009. “
Balaji Vittal graduated in Civil Engineering from Jadavpur University, Koklata. A participant in film and music quizzes and an amateur singer at college, Balaji freelanced for The Hindu’s supplements MetroPlus and Young World from 2007. He co-authored a book on composer Rahul Dev Burman — R.D. Burman: The Man, The Music (2011), which won the President’s Swarna Kamal Award for Best Book on Cinema at the National Film Awards that year. His second book — Gaata Rahe Mera Dil (2015) also co-authored with Anirudha Bhattacharjee — was awarded the Excellence in Writing on Cinema at the 17th Mumbai Film Festival in November 2015. Balaji is currently working on multiple books.
Baradwaj Rangan is a film critic. He won the National Award (Swarna Kamal) for Best Film Critic of 2005. His writings on cinema, music, art, books, travel and humour have been published in various national magazines like Open, Tehelka, Biblio, Outlook and Caravan. He has co-written the screenplay for the Tamil rom-com Kadhal 2 Kalyanam. He teaches a course on cinema at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. He has contributed to various anthologies, the most recent being an essay in Subramaniyapuram: The Tamil Film in English Translation. His first book, Conversations with Mani Ratnam, was published in 2012 and his second, Dispatches from the Wall Corner, in October 2014.
Brit Bildøen born 1962, is a Norwegian writer. Educated as a librarian, she published her first book, a collection of poetry, in 1991. She has written children’s books, poems and essays, and 14 novels. Her latest novel, Seven Days in August, was voted Best Novel of 2014 by listeners at Norwegian Broadcasting. Brit also translates, teaches creative writing, and works for publishers as a literary consultant. She is also a board member of Norwegian PEN.
C Basavalingaiah is the Director of the National School of Drama, Bengaluru Centre. He was earlier Director of Rangayana and Assistant Director in The National School of Drama Regional Resource Center (NSD-RRC). His journey in theatre began with his active involvement in Samuddya, a street movement. He has received many awards and honours including the Karnataka Nataka Academy Award and the Karnataka State Rajyotsava Award. He has directed several landmark plays in Kannada, Hindi, Telugu, Assamese and Malayalam. In 2009, Basavalingaiah directed Manushya Jaati Tanonde Valam, a light-and-sound production for the Karnataka Government’s Information and Publicity department. Based on the history of Karnataka, this two-hour play involved 300 artists from across the state. In 2010, Basavalingaiah directed a nine-hour play for the Rangayana Repertory. A stage adaptation of Kuvempu’s Malegalli Madumagalu, it was staged in four open areas and involved 150 artists. His plays in Kannada include Kusumabale, The Road, Gandhi vs Gandhi, Shoodra Thapasvi, Tippuvina Kanasugalu, King Oedipus, and Jangamadedege.
Cate Blake is a Commissioning Editor with Penguin Random House Australia. The books she has published have won or been nominated for various awards including the National Biography Award, the Ned Kelly Awards, the Davitt Awards, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the International Dublin Literary Award. She has a Bachelor of Arts, with honours in English literature and political science, from the University of Melbourne, and has developed her editorial and publishing skills through attending the Residential Editorial Programme, run by the Australian Publishers’ Association, and the Yale University Publishing Course in the US. Cate also sits on the board of the Emerging Writers’ Festival in Melbourne.
Deepa Dhanraj founded Yugantar, a film collective that arose from her involvement in the women’s movement in 1980. Between 1981 and 1983, Yugantar produced films on labour and gender relations in South India. Spanning over 30 years of practice, Dhanraj has worked in close participation with women’s groups and individuals to address concerns around women’s status, customary and formal law, participatory democracy, activism and citizenship in contemporary India. Some of her award-winning films - Kya Hua Is Shahar Ko?, Something like a War, Sudesha, The Legacy of Malthus, The Advocate and Invoking Justice - have been invited to festivals such as Berlinale, IDFA Amsterdam, FIlms de Femmes, Creteil, Leipzig, Oberhausen and the One World International HUman Rights Festival, Prague. She also has an interest in pedagogy and has created video materials to address the challenges faced by first-generation learners.
Durjoy Datta is a novelist, a screenwriter, an entrepreneur and a motivational speaker. He’s the author of 12 bestselling novels. His books predominantly deal with subjects of love, relationships, disability, drug abuse, sexuality and death. Durjoy is the co-founder of Grapevine India Publisher Pvt Ltd, a mainstream English language publisher that promotes young talent in the publishing industry. He is also a motivational speaker and has spoken in over 100 colleges and schools on the topics of entrepreneurship, writing, marketing, passions etc. Durjoy has, to his credit, nine television shows and over 1000 episodes. The shows have received considerable critical acclaim and commercial success. Durjoy is a graduate from Delhi College of Engineering and Management Development Institute. He worked in power engineering and banking for a few years before quitting to pursue his entrepreneurial and writing dreams.
Edwina Johnson has held significant publishing company roles at Allen & Unwin, Hachette and HarperCollins. Her publicity client list of international authors included such eminent writers as David Suzuki, Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Jeanette Winterson and Jonathan Franzen. These relationships sustained into the next phase of her career — literary festivals — led by the Sydney Writers Festival where she was the Artistic Operations Manager working over three festivals. Edwina moved to Byron Bay when invited to direct the 2014 Byron Writers Festival and has now curated three festivals as well as managing the year round programme and operations of Byron Writers Festival.
Fiona Henderson has more than 20 years experience as a successful trade publisher, head of publishing and editor at Transworld, Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette and Affirm Press. She has published many Australian bestsellers over the years, including Almost French, Holy Cow! and Salvation Creek, and acquired rights for international titles that went on to become local bestsellers like Lucky Man, Catch me If You Can and The Wolf of Wall Street. Her speciality is memoir but she publishes both nonfiction and fiction. Her latest book for Affirm Press is the highly acclaimed debut novel, The Birdman’s Wife.
G.N. DEVY’s books in English include After Amnesia, In another Tongue, Of Many Heroes, A Nomad called Thief, Painted Words, The Question of Silence, Countering Violence, The Crisis Within Knowledge and Mahabharata: The Epic and the Nation. He writes in Marathi and Gujarati as well. He has edited a large series of volumes on The Key Concepts in Indigenous Studies and another on Mahatma Gandhi in Indian Languages. Along with with Tony Joseph and Ravi Korisettar, he co-edited The Indians: Histories of a Civilisation covering the India past over the last 12000 years. The People’s Linguistic survey of India, which was initiated and led by him, covered 780 living languages of India. His work is spread over Literature, Aesthetics, Philosophy, Linguistics, Anthropology, Education and History. At present, he is working on a massive account of the Civilisation of Asia and Africa.
Gauri Devidayal is a law graduate from the University College London and a qualified Chartered Accountant from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales. She pursued her career as a tax consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers in London and Mumbai. When she married Jay Yousuf, she joined him in creating The Table, a restaurant in South Mumbai. Most recently, Gauri co-founded Magazine Street Kitchen along with Jay and their Executive Chef, Alex Sanchez. This is a culinary playground for intimate dinners, cooking workshops and more housed in a restored heritage structure, in Byculla.
Gauri Viswanathan is Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She has published widely on education, religion, and culture; nineteenth-century British and colonial cultural studies; and the history of modern disciplines. She is the author of Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (Columbia, 1989; 2014) and Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, 1998), which won the Harry Levin Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association, the James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association of America, and the Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. She also edited Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (Vintage, 2001). She is coeditor of the book series South Asia Across the Disciplines, published jointly by the university presses of Columbia, Chicago, and California under a Mellon grant. She has received the Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Mellon fellowships. Her current work is on genealogies of secularism and the writing of alternative religious histories.
Geraldine Brooks is an Australia-born author and journalist who grew up in Sydney’s western suburbs. In 1982, she won a scholarship to the journalism master’s programme at Columbia University in New York. Later she worked for the Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the West Asia, Africa and the Balkans. In 2006, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel March. Her novels, Caleb’s Crossing and People of the Book were both New York Times bestsellers, and Year of Wonders and People of the Book are international bestsellers, translated into more than 25 languages. She is also the author of the acclaimed nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. In 2011, she presented Australia’s prestigious Boyer Lectures, later published as The Idea of Home. Her latest title The Secret Chord (2015) was shortlisted for the Indy Awards, chosen by Australia’s independent booksellers. In 2016 she was appointed Officer in the Order of Australia for her services to literature. Geraldine Brooks lives in Massachusetts with her husband, author Tony Horwitz, and their two sons.
Girish Kasaravalli is an award-winning filmmaker whose maiden film Ghatashraddha won three awards at the National Film Awards in 1977. A gold medalist from the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, Girish has made 14 films in his four-decade career and has won the President’s Lotus Awards 17 times. He is only the third director after Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen to have won the Golden Lotus Award four times. Among his films are Tabarane Katha, Thayi Saheba and Dweepa. He has also made two documentaries Ananthamurthy: Not A Hypothesis But A Reflection on eminent Kannada author U.R. Ananthamurthy and Images/Reflections: A Journey into the Images of Adoor Gopalakrishnan. His films have been shown at festivals in London, New York, Rotterdam, Rome, Moscow, among others. His works for television include an adaptation of S.L. Bhyrappa’s Grihabhangha, documentaries on artist K.K. Hebbar and author Niranjana and a four-part serial on the first peasant uprising of Karnataka. He has been awarded the Padma Shri from the Government of India and the Puttanna Kanagal Award from the government of Karnataka.
Guillermo Rodriguez (Dr.) an active promoter of Indo-Spanish cultural relations, is the founding director of Casa de la India, a pioneering cultural centre set up in Spain in 2003. A passionate traveller and multilingual writer, he lived in India in the 1990s and specialised in Indian literary criticism, modern Indian poetry in English and translation, obtaining a PhD from the University of Kerala and the University of Valladolid. He has published critical works on Indian literature and culture in India, Spain, France, Germany and Poland, and is the author of When Mirrors Are Windows: A View of A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetics published in 2016. In 2012 he was awarded the Friendship Award by the Minister of External Affairs, Government of India, for his contribution to Indo-Spanish cultural relations.
GULAMMOHAMMED SHEIKH studied painting at Baroda and London. He taught art history and painting for nearly three decades at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S University of Baroda. He has had several exhibitions of paintings in India and abroad including a solo exhibition of paintings at the Centre George Pompidou, Paris, 1985. He is now involved in the movement of modern Gujarati literature. He has published two collections of poems — Athawa (1974) and Athawa Ane (2014) — and essays on art in Indian and international journals and lectured on Indian art in Asia, Europe and the US. His awards include the Padma Bhushan (2014), Kalidas Samman (2002), Ravi Varma Puraskaram (2009).
HS Shivaprakash is a Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the author of nine books of poems, 15 plays and three critical works in Kannada, which have been performed and translated into several Indian languages and English, French, Italian and German. His English books include I Keep Vigil of Rudra; Traditional India Theatre; Autumn Ways; Indian Theatre 2000; In Other Worlds: Poems 1976-2000; and Everyday Yogi. He has won several best book prizes from the Karnataka Literary Akademi. His areas of interest include theatre/literary history, Indian theatre, Medieval Studies, Comparative Literature, translation and folklore. His awards include Karnataka’s Rajyotsava Award; the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award and the Sahitya Akademi Award. He has been the editor of Indian Literature; dean of the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, and director of The Tagore Centre, Berlin, Germany. He has travelled, lectured and read poetry in various countries in Europe, Asia and Americas.
Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar is a medical officer with the government of Jharkhand. His stories and articles have been published in Indian Literature, The Statesman, The Asian Age, Good Housekeeping, Northeast Review, The Four Quarters Magazine, Alchemy: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories II and The Times of India. The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey is his first novel.
Hanya Yanagihara is the author of the novels A Little Life and The People in the Trees. She lives in New York.
Iffat Fatima is a Delhi-based independent documentary filmmaker and researcher from Kashmir. Her films include, Lanka: The Other Side of War and Peace; The Kesar Saga; In the Realm of the Visual; and Boojh Sakey To Boojh. Her video installation, Ethnography of a European City: Conversations in Salzburg, questions some of the assumptions in the east vs. west polarity/ dichotomy /disparity. She did the audio-visual design for Gold Dust of Begum Sultans, an exhibition at the IGNCA and co-edited a compendium Bread Beauty Revolution: Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (1914-1987). Since 2006, she has been working on the issue of enforced disappearances in Kashmir in collaboration with the Association Of Parents Of Disappeared Persons (APDP). In 2011, she made a short film Where Have You Hidden My New Crescent Moon on enforced disappearances. Her most recent film Khoon Diy Baarav (Blood Leaves its Trail) explores issues of violence and memory in Kashmir.
Ira Mukhoty is the author of Akbar: The Great Mughal, Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire and Heroines: Powerful Indian Women in Myth and History. Living in one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, she developed an interest in the evolution of mythology and history, the erasure of women from these histories, and the continuing relevance this has on the status of women in India. She writes rigorously researched narrative histories that are accessible to the lay reader. She lives in Gurgaon with her husband and two daughters. Her first novel Song of Draupadi was published in August 2021.
JAYANTHI NATARAJAN is Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests, and a Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha, where she is a representative of Tamil Nadu. She started her career as a lawyer in Chennai. In keeping with her interests in social issues and women’s rights, she has done pro bono work for a number of social organisations such as the All India Women’s Conference. Her entry into politics came in the early 1980s as a member of the Indian National Congress, for which she has, in the past, also been a party spokesperson.
Jonathan Gil Harris has been visiting India for 15 years, and has been a permanent resident since June last year. He was Professor of English at George Washington University and Associate Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, the world’s leading journal of Shakespeare studies. He is the author of six books on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Shakespeare and Literary Theory and Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. In recent years, his scholarship has turned to Indian themes. He is the editor of a collection of essays, Indography: Writing the ‘Indian’ in Early Modern Culture, and has written two series for the Hindustan Times on ‘India Bana Pardes’ and ‘Tales of the First Firangis’. His most recent book is The First Firangis: How to Be Authentically Indian. Harris is now Professor of English and Dean of Academic Affairs at Ashoka University in Rai, Haryana.
SATCHIDANANDAN K. is perhaps the most translated of contemporary Indian poets , having 23 collections of translation in 19 languages. He writes poetry in Malayalam and prose in Malayalam and English. His book While I Write: New and Selected Poems (Harper Collins) came out in 2011. He has lectured and read his poetry across the world. He was a professor of English, and later the chief executive of the Indian National Academy of Literature (Sahitya Akademi) and the Director of the School of Translation Studies, IGNOU, Delhi. He has won 27 literary awards including the Sahitya Akademi, Kerala Sahitya Akademi award (five times), Kusumagraj National Award, NTR National award, Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad Award, Knighthood of the Order of Merit from the Government of Italy and India-Poland Friendship Medal from the Government of Poland.
K. Srilata is a writer, translator and academic. Her latest book This Kind of Child: The ‘Disability’ Story (Westland), brings together first-person accounts, interviews and short fiction on the disability experience. Her books include five collections of poetry, the anthologies The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry, Short Fiction from South India (OUP), All the Worlds Between: A Collaborative Poetry Project Between India and Ireland (Yoda), and Lifescapes: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers from Tamil Nadu (Women Unlimited). Srilata’s novel Table for Four (Penguin) was long- listed in 2009 for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Formerly a Professor of Literature at IIT-Madras, Srilata is now Professor and Director, Centre for Creative Writing and Translation, Sai University, Chennai.
Kanhaiya Kumar an All India Student Federation (AISF) activist, was the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union in 2015-16. He is pursuing his PhD from the Centre for African Studies at the School of International Studies, JNU, New Delhi. His memoir, From Bihar to Tihar (English) and Bihar se Tihar (Hindi), was published in 2016.
KANNAN SUNDARAM (S R Sundaram) was the proprietor of Kalachuvadu Pathippagam from 1995 to 2010 and is presently the Managing Director and Publisher of Kalachuvadu Publication Pvt Ltd, besides being Editor and Publisher of Kalachuvadu, a monthly journal for culture and politics. He co-organised ‘Tamil In 2000’, a privately funded international Tamil conference on 20th century Tamil writing and was part of the international visitor programme to the U.S in 2002 and of the Frankfurt Book Fair fellowship programme in 2007. Kannan is on a mission to get the best pieces of literature available in Tamil translated to other Indian and world languages and vice versa. He has published a few books containing his columns and critical articles on Tamil media and Politics.
Karan Mahajan was born in 1984 and grew up in New Delhi. He is the author of the novels Family Planning (2008), a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and The Association of Small Bombs (2016), a finalist for the 2016 National Book Awards and the winner of the 2017 Bard Prize. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker Online, The Believer, n+1, and other venues. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he is at work on his third novel.
Karthika VK is Publisher and Chief Editor, HarperCollins Publishers India.
Katherine Boo deep nonfiction reporting from within poor communities has been honoured with a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and a MacArthur “genius” grant. Her first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, documented the experiences of families in a Mumbai slum and the effects of systemic corruption on their lives. It won the National Book Award and has since been translated into 33 languages. The wife of writer and historian Sunil Khilnani, Boo is also a contributor to the New Yorker magazine, and divides her time between India and the US.
Kirti Jain , a former Director of the National School of Drama, is a theatre director and pedagogue. She has contributed articles to theatre-related books and journals including entries in The Oxford Companion to Theatre, and has produced plays and documentaries for Doordarshan. Kirti Jain has directed several plays over a career spanning nearly forty years. Her recent directorial work includes Aur Kitne Tukde about Partition; Kaun Thagwa Nagaria Lootal Ho on globalisation; and Sab Kuch Chakachak, a play for young people about displacement; Baghdad Burning, which evolved from a blog on the American invasion of Iraq; and Hamara Shahar Us Baras about fall out of communal unrest. Her interest in education led her to initiate the Theatre in Education company at NSD. Her concern for developing theatre spaces and audience in Delhi led to the organisation of Week End Theatre through Natarang Pratishthan. She was honoured with the B.V Karanth Smriti Puraskar by NSD in 2010 and the Sangeet Natak Akademi award for Direction in 2011.
Her first novel, Witness the Night, won the Costa First Novel Award in 2010. It was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Award and longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, amongst many other awards. Her third novel, The Sea of Innocence has just been published in India and UK and will shortly release in Australia. Origins of Love, her second novel, was published to critical acclaim in UK, India and Australia in 2012. Her first book, Darling ji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, was published in 2007. She is an author and columnist who previously worked in television.
Laura Kroetsch was appointed Director of Adelaide Writers’ Week in 2011. In 2012, she introduced the highly successful Kids’ Day, now the Kids’ Weekend. In 2014, she introduced out-of-season programming. Adelaide Writers’ Week 2017 is her sixth consecutive programme. Laura came to Adelaide from the New Zealand International Arts Festival where she ran their literary festival Writers & Readers. Laura has spent 20 years working in the world of books and literature as a bookseller, a freelance writer and editor, a critic and book reviewer. She is an advocate for writers and readers and works with various literary and community groups to build arts access and develop readership for emerging writers.
Malavika Sarukkai is a dancer-choreographer whose work is distinguished by its intense, extraordinary and luminous qualities. She is acclaimed globally for her creative choreographies, which take dance beyond specific geographies. As a pathbreaking dancer from India, she has contributed a significant and large body of work through multiple collaborations. These interactions bring to her choreographic interpretations the incandescent beauty of the classical language and the energised articulation of a contemporary mind. This approach has been documented in the personal and searching film, The Unseen Sequence, directed by Sumantra Ghosal. She has received many accolades including the Padma Shri, the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award and the Natya Kala Acharya award from the Music Academy, Chennai.
Manjula Padmanabhan is an author, playwright and cartoonist. Her books include Getting There, a travel memoir and Harvest, winner of the 1997 Onassis Award for theatre. Escape, a science-fiction novel set in a woman-less future, was published in 2008 and its sequel, The Island of Lost Girls, is due in 2015.
Mark Kurlansky is an American journalist and author. From 1976 to 1991, he worked as foreign correspondent for the International Herald Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, the Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer and his articles have appeared in newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, Partisan Review, Harper’s, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Audubon Magazine, Food & Wine, Gourmet, Bon Appetit and Parade. He has authored 29 books including fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books and he often illustrates them himself. His books have been translated into 25 languages. Cod, Salt, 1968, and Food of a Younger Land have all featured on international best-seller lists. He has guest lectured at Columbia University School of Journalism, Yale University, Colby College, Grinnell College, the University of Dayton; taught a two-week creative writing class in Assisi, Italy; a one-week intensive nonfiction workshop in Devon, England; and guest lectured all over the world on history, writing, environmental issues, and other subjects.
Markus Zusak is the author of five books, including the international bestseller, The Book Thief, which has been translated into more than 40 languages. His first four novels — The Underdog, Fighting Ruben Wolfe, When Dogs Cry (also known as Getting the Girl) and I am the Messenger released between 1999 and 2002 — were published internationally and garnered a number of awards and honours in his native Australia and throughout the world. The Book Thief was released in 2005 and has become one of the most successful books to come out of Australia. It has been a bestseller on every continent, has held the number one position at both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, and has spent more than a decade on the The New York Times bestseller list. In 2013, it was adapted into film, directed by Brian Percival, and starring Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson and Sophie Nelisse. Markus Zusak grew up in Sydney, Australia, and still lives there with his wife and two children.
MARÍA REIMÓNDEZ is a Galician translator, interpreter, writer and activist. She has published poetry collections such as Moda Galega (2002) or Presente Continuo (2013); novels for both adults and children such as O club da calceta (translated into Italian and Spanish, with a theatre adaptation by Teatro do Morcego and a film version produced by Ficción Producciones), En vías de extinción (translated into Spanish), A música dos seres vivos, and essays. She has received several prestigious awards in Galicia including the Xerais novel award for Dende o conflito, the Plácido Castro award for translation and the Award for Author of the Year by the Galician Publishers Association in 2014. She has a long connection to Tamil Nadu and has translated authors such as Salma, Kutti Revathi, Malathi Maitri, Sukirtharani and Thamizhachi into Galician.
Mini Krishnan is the co-ordinating editor of the Tamil Nadu Textbook and Educational Services Corporation’s plan to support English translations of Tamil works through 14 publishers. She has edited literary translations for Oxford University Press (2001-19) and for Macmillan India Ltd (1992-2000). She was the Founding Editor of the South Asia Website for Women Writers hosted by the British Council; Member, Translation Mission; and Member, Indian Literature Abroad. She writes for The Hindu, the English portal of the Mathrubhoomi, and selects translated fiction for Frontline. Over her four-decade-long career, she has edited 135 full-length translations — fiction, non-fiction, poetry and short stories — from 15 Indian languages, been and worked on educational texts prescribed at school and university levels.
MM Murugappan is the Vice Chairman of the Corporate and Supervisory Board of the Murugappa Group. As a Member of the Board, he chairs the Investment Committee and oversees technology and research across the Murugappa Group. In addition, he is the Chairman of businesses falling under the engineering sector of the Murugappa Group i.e. Tube Investments of India (TII), and Carborundum Universal (CUMI). He is on the board of several companies outside the Murugappa Group such as Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. (Mumbai) and Cyient Ltd. (Hyderabad). He served on the Board of Governors of IIT Madras, for six years till November 2011 and has enabled many industry-academic partnerships. He now serves on the board of the IIT-Madras Research Park and is a mentor to many companies incubated there. As Trustee of the Group’s AMM Foundation, he is actively involved in the development of various citizenship initiatives, particularly in education, health care, performing arts and sport. Murugappan’s hobbies include golf, reading, walking, classical music and the theatre.
Molly Crabapple is an artist, journalist, and author of the memoir, Drawing Blood. Called “An emblem of the way art can break out of the gilded gallery” by the New Republic, she has drawn in and reported from Guantanamo Bay, Abu Dhabi’s migrant labour camps, and in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, and Iraqi Kurdistan. Crabapple is a contributing editor for VICE, and has written for publications including The New York Times, Paris Review, and Vanity Fair. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Monica De La Fuente is a dancer, choreographer and specialist in Indian performing arts. She has devoted herself for the last 20 years to the creation and dissemination of the classical and contemporary dances of India. Trained in in Bharatanatyam and Kathakali from Kalakshetra and Meena Raman (Chennai) and Kalamandalam and Margi (Kerala), she founded her own dance theatre company in Spain and has performed at numerous festivals and theatres in India, Europe, and the US. Her contemporary dance choreography includes Laya Chitra (2008) and La voz del cuerpo (2013) with musician Ravi Prasad, operatic productions like Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers and Puccini’s Edgar and Indo-Flamenco creations like Indalusia with renowned flamenco-jazz musician Jorge Pardo and Rasa-Duende (2015). She has been the artistic coordinator and choreographer for Carlos Saura’s show Flamenco, India and associate director of Kijote Kathakali a theatre production directed by Ignacio Garcia. She teaches Indian performing arts at Casa de la India in Valladolid and has been a guest teacher at various theatre schools and universities of Spain, France and Germany.
Mukund Padmanabhan was the editor of The Hindu between 2016 and 2019
N Manu Chakravarthy is Professor and Head of the Department of English at NMKRV College, Bangalore. During the last three decades, he has taught Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Cultural Theory and Theories of Communication to graduate and post-graduate students. He was awarded the Swarna Kamal, the President’s Gold Medal, for Best National Critic at the 58th National Film Awards in 2010. He also won the V M Inamdar award for his book Madhyama Marga on literature and culture. He writes extensively on cinema, music, literature and culture and has several books in English and Kannada to his credit.
N. RAM, former Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu and other Group publications, is a political journalist with literary interests. A former Chairman and a former Publisher of The Hindu Publishing Group, he is currently a Director in the Group. Ram has written on a range of socio-political subjects, including media freedom and responsibility, and specialised in investigative journalism. His areas of special journalistic interest include Indian politics; aspects of India’s foreign policy and nuclear policy; external pressures on India’s economic and political sovereignty; issues of corruption and abuse of power; the challenge of communalism and fundamentalism in India; the Sri Lankan ethnic crisis, the Tamil question, and India’s interaction with it; India-China relations; freedom of expression issues; and the role of media in society. He is a co-biographer, with Susan Ram, of the writer, R.K. Narayan. He was elected president of the Contemporary India Section of the 72nd session of the Indian History Congress (2011). Honours and awards include the Padma Bhushan (for journalism), 1990; the Sri Lanka Ratna (2005); the Asian Investigative Journalist of the Year Award from the Press Foundation of Asia (1990); the B.D. Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism (1989); XLRI’s first JRD Tata Award for Business Ethics (2002); the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism’s Alumni Award (2003); and the Raja Ram Mohan Roy Award for contributions to journalism from the Press Council of India (2018).
N. Ravi is the Chairman of Kasturi & Sons Ltd, the holding company of The Hindu Group, and was earlier the Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu. He was Chairman of the Board of Press Trust of India, and the President of the Editors’ Guild of India. He is the Chairman of the India Chapter of the International Press Institute, and has been a member of the Executive Board of the International Press Institute, Vienna. Mr Ravi is presently Chairman of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Chennai Kendra. He was a member of the National Integration Council, Government of India, and from 2006 to 2008 of the National Security Advisory Board. He has a Master’s degree in Economics, and a degree in Law, and has won several academic awards including a gold medal in Constitutional and International Law. He was a Fellow at the Harvard Law School in 2000, and Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University in 2004. In 2013, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University.
Naazneen Karmali is India Editor of Forbes Asia and Mumbai Bureau Manager, Forbes. Currently, her responsibilities extend to parts of Southeast Asia as well. Naazneen has been writing and reporting on India’s entrepreneurs since 1981. She began her career as a reporter at Business India and rose through the ranks to become managing editor. Naazneen is also a founding director of the Satyagyan Foundation, a non-profit that is committed to an integrated approach to education, livelihoods and community development for the underprivileged. She is a member of the Sustainability Advisory Council of Deutsche Post-DHL and has also been a Fellow of the Asia Society, New York. She has co-authored The Hit Parade, which profiles India’s business tycoons.
NANDINI KRISHNAN is the author of Hitched: The Modern Indian Woman and Arranged Marriage and Invisible Men: Inside India’s Transmasculine Networks. She is also the award-winning translator of Perumal Murugan’s Estuary and Four Strokes of Luck and Other Stories. Her translation of Kalki’s magnum opus Ponniyin Selvan is being released in 10 parts. She has translated Charu Nivedita’s Conversations with Aurangzeb: A Novel. Nandini’s novel-in-manuscript won the Writers of the World Festival prize, 2014. Her translation of Sajjad Haider Yaldram’s Save Me from My Friends was shortlisted for the Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu-English Translation 2022. Nandini lives with dozens of animals, thousands of books, and a varying number of humans in Madras.
Narayan Lakshman is a Senior Associate Editor at The Hindu, As a member of the senior editorial management of the newspaper, he manages its opinion pages, writes editorial and opinion articles, and has curated special editorial projects including article series on India’s water and healthcare crises and investigative features. He has written over 2,000 articles to date. He regularly appears on news television channels as an expert political commentator. From February 2010, Dr. Lakshman served for six years as The Hindu’s U.S. correspondent based in Washington DC and earlier worked in the Tamil Nadu bureau at The Hindu’s Chennai headquarters. His doctoral research at the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics, on the political economy of poverty alleviation in India, was synthesised into a book titled Patrons of the Poor: Caste Politics and Policymaking in India (2011, OUP India). He also served as a consultant at the Asian Development Bank, where he authored a Working Paper on “The Political Economy of Good Governance for Poverty Alleviation Policies”. He has been a research analyst at a London-based hedge fund.
Nathaniel Brooks Horwitz is a junior at Harvard University studying molecular biology. He is an opinion writer at The Harvard Crimson and a contributing author for Town & Country Magazine.
P Athiyaman, a PhD in Tamil, is presently assistant director with the All India Radio. A specialist in the history of modern Tamil literature, he has published biographies and histories of little-known personalities and events. Athiyaman has written extensively in Tamil, and his publications include biographies of George Joseph and P Varadarajulu Naidu. The author of a definitive history of the Cheranmadevi Gurukulam controversy, he is now completing a manuscript on the Vaikom Satyagraha. He has also edited the poems of Bharati for new readers
P Chidambaram is a former Union Minister of Finance and has also served as the Union Minister for Home in the Government of India. He is an eminent lawyer practising in the Supreme Court of India. A public intellectual and author, his first collection of essays was published in 2006 under the title A View from the Outside: Why Good Economics Works for Everyone. He writes a weekly column on the economy, politics, social issues, foreign policy and contemporary affairs. He is a member of the Indian National Congress, and was elected to Parliament seven times from the Sivaganga constituency in Tamil Nadu.His latest book is Standing Guard: A Year in the Opposition.
Srinivasan, Pankaja has been a journalist for more thsn 25 years. She has been with The Hindu for eight years and is currently Senior assistant editor heading the MetroPlus edition in Coimbatore. She has travelled the length and breadth of the country accompanying her husband who was a helicopter pilot in the Indian Air Force, and lived with him and two infants at Leh for two years. She enjoys travelling and writing about her travels.
Nayar, Parvathi is a contemporary visual artist based in Chennai – who works with hand-drawn graphite on wood, paint, video and sculpture. Parvathi received her Masters in Fine Art from Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London, on a Chevening scholarship. She has exhibited widely in India and abroad, and her works collected by institutions such as the Singapore Art Museum. Parvathi is also a writer, poet and commentator on aspects of creative disciplines that include film, literature and modern dance. Her upcoming solo in Chennai (Feb2014) is titled The Ambiguity of Landscapes.
ZACHARIA, PAUL is a Malayalam fiction writer and columnist.He is known for taking a non-conformist stance in political commentary and for his humour and the use of unconventional themes in his works of fiction. The author of over forty books, he has received the central and state Sahitya Akademi awards, among others. His works have been translated into several Indian and international languages. He lives in Thiruvananthapuram.
PERUMAL MURUGAN is the author of 11 novels and five collections of short stories, poems and a memoir as well as 10 books of non-fiction. He is the winner of ILF Samanvay Bhasha Samman 2015. In 2018, his books One Part Woman and Poonachi were long-listed for the National Book Awards for Translated Literature in the U.S. and Pyre was shortlisted for the JCB Prize, the Atta Galatta-BLF Award for Translated Literature and longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023. His Seasons of the Palm was shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize. He won the JCB Prize for Literature 2023 for his novel Fire Bird. He worked as the Principal of Anna College, Namakkal, from where he took voluntary retirement.
Perumpadavam Sreedharan is a novelist, short story writer and author of over 60 books. He is also an award-winning script writer. His novel, Oru Samkeertanam Pole (Like a Psalm), depicting the 21 days of budding love between Fyodor Dostoevsky and Anna Snitkina, is a bestseller currently in its 75th edition. He is a recipient of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, the Vayalar Award and many other honours. Till recently he was President of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi. He lives in Thiruvananthapuram.
Pradeep Chakravarthy, who is based in Chennai, runs a heritage tour company and does management consultancy in behaviour change
Pradeep Sebastian is the author of The Groaning Shelf, a collection of bibliophilic essays on the book arts. A literary columnist for The Hindu and a film columnist for the Deccan Herald, he is also the co-editor of 50 Writers, 50 Books: The Best of Indian Fiction. His forthcoming novel is a biblio-mystery titled The Book Hunters of Katpadi.
Pralayan Shanmugasundaram Chandrasekaran, better known as Pralayan, is one of the pioneering theatre personalities who are spearheading the modern theatre movement with the major emphasis towards the open-air theatre performances in Tamil Nadu. As the founder and convener of Chennai Kalai Kuzhu, he has been active in the Tamil Nadu theatre scene from 1984. He has written, facilitated and directed more than 50 open-air plays and 23 proscenium plays including Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince, Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, Habib Tanvir’s Moteram ka Satyagragh, Charandas Chor, Chandrashekhara Kambara’s Mahamayi, Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes. Pralayan’s works and presentations are known for their dynamic engagement with the space and its design and vibrant music. He has also conducted workshops and directed the plays across India and in countries like Norway, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.
Preeti Shenoy is among the top five highest-selling authors in India. Her books include It’s All In The Planets, Why We Love The Way We Do, The Secret Wish List, The One You Cannot Have among others. She is also on the Forbes longlist of the most influential celebrities in India. She has been awarded the Academia award for Business Excellence by the New Delhi Institute of Management. She received the ‘100 Young Indian Women Achievers Award’ in the Powerful leader category. She has given talks in institutions such as the IITs and IIMs and corporate organisations like KPMG, Infosys and Accenture. She is also an artist specialising in portraiture and illustrated journalling. She has a popular blog and also writes a weekly column in The Financial Chronicle. She has a huge online following. Her other interests are travel, photography and Ashtanga yoga.
PREMA REVATHI is a writer, actor and activist who runs a school for nomadic tribal children at a village in coastal Tamil Nadu. She was a full-time journalist and continues to write articles in English and Tamil. She is also a translator and is working on non-fiction translations from English to Tamil. Along with Krishna Veni, she began Maitri, a feminist publishing house that aims to bring out memoirs of women, books introducing feminist philosophies and literary anthologies on feminist themes. Lakshmi Ennum Payani, a memoir by a woman activist from a small town in Tamil Nadu, is Maitri’s first Book.
Prince Rama Varma is a direct descendant of Maharaja Swathi Thirunal and Raja Ravi Varma of Travancore and a singer, veena player, writer, voracious reader, orator and eternal student. He takes care to learn the word-by-word meaning of every song that he sings, be it in Sanskrit, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi or even Bengali. He also generously shares his insights with his listeners.
R V RAMANI is a leading documentary filmmaker and cinematographer. He is a graduate of the Film and TV Institute of India, Pune, specialising in cinematography. With more than 25 independent films to his credit, he has established a unique style of his own, making self-reflective impressionistic documentaries, which has found recognition in India and abroad.
Rahman Abbas is author of six books including four novels — Nakhalistan Ki Talash (The Search of an Oasis, 2004), Ek Mamnua Muhabbat Ki Kahani (A Forbidden Love Story, 2009), Khuda Ke Saaye Mein Ankh Micholi (Hide and Seek in the Shadow of God, 2011), Rohzin (The Melancholy of Soul, 2016]. He received the State Sahitya Academy Award for Hide and Seek in the Shadow of God, which he returned when Indian writers protested against ‘intolerance’ in 2015. Rahman was awarded the Universal Center for Peace and Research’s National Award for his A Forbidden Love Story. His novels deal with themes of forbidden politics and love. He works at Strategic Foresight Group, as South Asia Security Research Officer and lives in Mumbai.
RAJIV C LOCHAN is the Managing Director and CEO of Kasturi & Sons Ltd (most famously known as The Hindu Group of Publications in India). He heads all non-editorial operations and is the first non-family member on the Board in the company’s 137-year history. Rajiv also devotes time to the social sector in the areas of public health and financial inclusion. He is a Trustee Board member of IKP Trust, a not-for-profit organisation focussed on leveraging knowledge and technology to drive innovation in public health and on the Board of IFMR Trust Financial Holdings, an entity focussed on delivering financial products and services to the bottom of the pyramid in rural geographies in India. Rajiv is an alumnus partner of McKinsey’s India practice and one of the firm’s founding partners of its Chennai practice. At McKinsey, Rajiv served over 30 institutions, including 25 banks and financial institutions in India, South-east Asia and the US. Prior to McKinsey, Rajiv worked for American Express Company in New York, where he was most recently Director - Risk Management, responsible for credit/fraud authorisations policy formulation. Rajiv has also worked with US Airways in Arlington, VA, in the schedule-planning group and was a summer intern at the World Bank in Washington, DC. He holds an undergraduate degree from IIT, Madras, and an MS from MIT, Cambridge, MA, and an MBA from the Columbia Business School in New York.
RAVINDER SINGH is the bestselling author of I Too Had A Love Story and Can Love Happen Twice? (Penguin India). His work has been praised in several print and electronic media. A graduate of the Indian School of Business, he hails from Chandigarh and currently works in Hyderabad for a multinational company.
Rekha Menon is a well-known face in Kerala television media. She has more than 15 years of experience in anchoring TV shows and is a columnist and a speaker at various forums and platforms in South India.. In her other life, she is a marketing and communications professional with over 20 years of experience in the IT Services and Entertainment sectors. Currently she is the Vice President and Head of Corporate Communications for a US-based investment bank and is based in Chennai. Some of her prestigious awards include being on India Today’s list of Top 25 Women Achievers in Kerala, Most Talented Marketing Professional by World Marketing Congress, Best Anchor Award for Women’s Shows by Asia Vision Awards. She was also visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
Rishi Kapoor is one of India’s most popular film stars. He debuted as a child artiste in his father Raj Kapoor’s magnum opus Mera Naam Joker, winning a National Award for his performance. His first role in the lead came with Bobby, a blockbuster that established a new template for the teeny-bopper romance in Hindi cinema. In the 1970s, a decade known for Amitabh Bachchan’s angry young man films, Rishi Kapoor not only held his own but also carved a niche for himself in a series of musical hits like Khel Khel Mein, Laila Majnu, Hum Kisise Kum Naheen, Sargam and Karz. He was also the perfect foil to Bachchan in some of the most celebrated hits of the era like Kabhi Kabhie, Amar Akbar Anthony, Naseeb and Coolie. Over the last decade, Rishi Kapoor has delivered some of the finest performances of his career in a diverse array of roles — a middle-class school teacher in Do Dooni Char, a dreaded don in D-Day, a pimp in Agneepath and a naughty grand old patriarch in Kapoor & Sons — far removed from the chocolate-boy romantic hero of the 1970s.
Ritu Beri is one of the few designers to have blurred the lines between the East and the West. She was the first Asian to head a French fashion house, Jean Louis Scherrer. She trained under the legendary Françoise Lesage and wowed Paris with her collections. She has been recognised for her work in design with several awards and honours, including the coveted Chevaliere des art et des letters and the Spanish title of “The Lady of the Order of Civil Merit.” Taking her engagement with design beyond clothes, she initiated Ritu Beri Fashion Fraternity to hand-hold aspiring designers and to launch them on creative career paths. She has written five books so far, including The Journey of a Restless Mind. The list of celebrities who have sported her label includes Bill Clinton, Prince Charles, Nicole Kidman, Ivana Trump, Madhuri Dixit and Katrina Kaif.
Rosella Stephen is the editor of The Hindu Magazine and Literary Review. She was earlier editor of Weekend, the Saturday magazine at The Hindu, and launched Indulge, a lifestyle magazine at The New Indian Express in 2006. She has served on multiple panels on entertainment, art appreciation, luxury and leadership at various organisations, including The British Council, Biennale of Contemporary Sacred Art (BACS), IndiEarth Xchange, FDCI and Lakme Fashion Week. Culture is at an important inflection point, she says, and the access provided by digital, video and social makes this an interesting time to be documenting it.
Rumena Bužarovska is the author of three short story collections – Čkrtki (Scribbles, 2007), Osmica (Wisdom Tooth, 2010) and Mojot maž (My Husband, 2014). She is a literary translator from English into Macedonian and her translations include Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking Glass), J.M. Coetzee (The Life and Times of Michael K), Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) and Richard Gwyn (The Colour of a Dog Running Away). She is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the State University of Skopje in the Republic of Macedonia. Rumena Bužarovska is one of 10 New Voices from Europe 2016, selected by Literary Europe Live.
MENON, SADANAND is a nationally reputed arts editor, popular teacher of cultural journalism, photographer, stage lights designer and prolific speaker at seminars on politics, ecology and the arts. He is currently Adjunct Faculty, Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, and at IIT, Madras. He is member, Apex Advisory Committee, National Museum, Delhi; Advisory Committee, National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru; Advisory Council, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi; Governing Council, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; and Managing Trustee, SPACES, An Arts Foundation, Chennai. A close associate of legendary choreographer Chandralekha, he is deeply involved with issues concerning contemporary Indian dance. He also curated a major Retrospective Exhibition of Fifty Years of Dashrath Patel’s work in painting, ceramics, photography and design for NGMA, Delhi and Mumbai.
Saeed Naqvi has been a reporter and foreign correspondent for over four decades. He has travelled the length and breadth of India (except Odisha, he insists) and over a hundred countries in pursuit of stories. He has covered many wars including India’s 1971 war with Pakistan, the civil war in Sri Lanka, 1971; the Sino-Vietnam war, 1979; the US bombing of Libya, 1986; the first coup in Fiji, 1987; the Nicaragua war, 1989; Operation Desert Storm, 1991; the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, 2003; and the Syrian civil war, 2011. Besides Indian leaders, Naqvi has interviewed world statesmen like Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, Muammar Gaddafi, Henry Kissinger, Benazir Bhutto, Hamid Karzai, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, J R Jayewardene, Hashemi Rafsanjani and scores of others. His writing has appeared in several national and international publications, including BBC News, the Sunday Observer, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Indian Express, Citizen and Outlook magazine.
Salil Tripathi is a contributing editor at Mint and Caravan, and lives in London. He was born in Bombay and studied at New Era School and later Sydenham College, and did his MBA at Amos Tuck School, Dartmouth College in the U.S. He has been a correspondent at India Today, and in 1991 he moved to Singapore, where he was regional economics correspondent for Far Eastern Economic Review. He moved to London in 1999 and has written for publications including Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, Washington Post, New Republic, Guardian, The New Yorker, and others. His journalism has won a Bastiat Prize and the Citibank Pan Asia Journalism Award. He is the author of Offence: The Hindu Case (Seagull, 2009), The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy (Aleph Book Company, 2014). A collection of travel essays (Tranquebar, 2015) will be published later this year.
SANDHYA RAO has worked in the media for many years, as a print journalist, books editor and children’s books writer, and also helped dancer Chandralekha coordinate an exhibition called ‘Stree’ as part of the Festival of India in Moscow, 1988. She has written about 25 books — mostly picture books — in English and other Indian languages such as Hindi, Tamil and Bengali. Some well-known titles are Ekki Dokki, Storm in the Garden, Grandma’s Eyes, My Friend the Sea, My Mother’s Sari, Picture Gandhi and My Gandhi Scrapbook. Her latest books are Stories on the Sand and Okaasama Otousama. In 2006, she was one of only two children’s authors from India to be invited to the Frankfurt Bookfair. Her book, My Friend the Sea, received a prize at the Berlin Literary Festival in 2005. She is now a Deputy Editor with the Hindu BusinessLine in Chennai.
Sanjaya Baru is Director for Geo-economics and Strategy, International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), London, and Honorary Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. He was Media Advisor and Principal Speechwriter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2004-08. He has been Chief Editor, Business Standard and The Financial Express; Editorial Page Editor, The Times of India and Associate Editor, The Economic Times. His publications include Strategic Consequences of India’s Economic Performance (Routledge, 2006), The Political Economy of Indian Sugar (Oxford University Press, 1990) and The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (Penguin/Viking, 2014).
Sarah Todd entered the world of modelling at the age of 18 and, for a decade, worked for labels such as Gucci, Hugo Boss, Pantene and Seafolly. Her travels led her to discover a love for food culture. Sarah trained in classical French cookery from Le Cordon Bleu and worked with Michelin star chefs Neil Borthwick and Angela Hartnett at Merchant’s Tavern in London, hatted restaurants Tonka and St. Crispin in Australia and was pinned as the favourite to win MasterChef Australia season 6. She opened Antares, a casual fine dining restaurant and beach club on Small Vagator Beach, Goa, and collaborates with India’s ethical and sustainable growers to source organic and pesticide-free produce. Sarah’s vision is to deliver contemporary, inspiring and seasonal cuisine that’s accessible and affordable. She has also filmed two television series: A Long Way for Dinner showing her journey from model to restaurant owner and Serve It Like Sarah in which she travels and cooks her way around Goa tasting local delicacies, elephant rides to health retreats. She published her first cookbook The Healthy Model Cookbook in May 2016.
Sashi Kumar is the founder and Chairman of the Media Development and Asian College of Journalism. He is a print and broadcast journalist. He was among the earliest newscasters in English on national television, Doordarshan, Middle East Correspondent of The Hindu and news anchor on Radio Bahrain in the mid-1980s. He has produced many docu-features for television. In 1992 he founded and launched Asianet, India’s first satellite and cable TV in a regional language. He received the Vijayaraghavan Memorial Award in 2007 and the Swadeshabhimani-Kesari Puraskaram from the government of Kerala in 2011 for his contribution to media. In 2004 he scripted and directed Kaya Taran, an award-winning Hindi feature film based on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the 2002 Gujarat riots. He has acted in a few Malayalam feature films. Sashi writes a regular fortnightly column titled ‘Unmediated’ in Frontline; it is also the title of the book comprising his essays and articles published by Tulika Books in 2013.
Shafey Kidwai a well-known bilingual critic, translator and reviewer, has been teaching Mass Communication at Aligarh Muslim University for 30 years. He has published more than a dozen books including Urdu Literature and Journalism: Critical Perspectives and Fiction Studies: A Post Modern Reading. He writes regularly on literary theories, culture and media for a number of English and Urdu periodicals and newspapers including The Hindu Friday Review. He has been on the editorial board of several peer-reviewed journals including Global Media published by Purdue University, US, and Calcutta University. He has translated many books from English into Urdu. He is a member of General Council of the Sahitya Akademi and National Council of Promotion of Urdu, Ministry of HRD. Presently he also serves as the Convener of the Urdu Committee, Bharatiya Jnanpith.
Chaudhuri, Shantanu Ray is managing editor at HarperCollins Publishers India. He has been in publishing for just over a decade and has edited books by some of India’s leading authors, including Manu Joseph, Anita Nair, Gulzar, among others. At Harper, he has also been responsible for building the list on books on cinema. Books commissioned by him have won the National Award Swarna Kamal for Best Book on Cinema for two years running, 2011 and 2012. He is also the author of a book of poems Whims (published by Writers Workshop) and a book of essays on cinema Icons from Bollywood (Penguin). He also founded and edited a film magazine Lights Camera Action for a year in 2000.
SHARAN APPARAO is one of the most well-known curators and promoters of art in India. Since her first presentation of art in 1983, she has made Chennai an established destination for the discerning collector, through Apparao Galleries and its sister concern Art Route (an export firm). In 2007, she was honoured by FICCI as one of the top women achievers in the country for her contribution towards promoting contemporary Indian art. In 2012 she was awarded the Ritz-Audi award for her contribution to art. With a background education in fine arts, Sharan has previously worked at the Smithsonian and Christie’s contemporary art. She now conducts shows in cities across India. It is her curatorial eye that has discovered and been associated with emerging talents in the field of art in India.
SHASHI THAROOR (Dr.), a third-term Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram, is the bestselling author of 25 books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and a former Minister of State for Human Resource Development and for External Affairs in the Government of India. He has won numerous awards, including the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019, Dr. Tharoor was also awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in the category of ‘English Non-Fiction’ for his book An Era of Darkness. He chairs Parliament’s Standing Committee on Chemicals and Fertilizers and has previously chaired the Standing Committee on External Affairs and the Committee on Information Technology.
Shiny Jacob Benjam in is an award-winning documentary producer and director from Kerala. She has also worked with Malayala Manorama and Mathrubhumi as feature writer. Her films include Murivunangatha Balyangal, Namukkum Avarkkum Idayil, Avan, Mazha, Nizhalukal, Bhagya , Ottayal and Translated Lives. Her latest film, In Return, Just a Book, is based on Perumpadavam Sreedharan’s novel Oru Sankeerthanam Pole, which was based on Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky’s life. The film was the official selection for the Indian Panorama Non-Feature section at IFFI Goa 2016.
Shonali Muthalaly is an Associate Editor at The Hindu, running the MetroPlus and Weekend supplements. A Chevening scholar, she writes and reports on the intersection between food and culture, and oversees The Hindu’s food vertical, building a product that engages with both diners and professionals in the culinary space. She also writes on theatre, art and travel.
Somini Sengupta a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, has reported from a Himalayan glacier, a Congo River ferry, the streets of Baghdad and Mumbai and many places in between. Born in Calcutta/Kolkata, she was The Times’ first Indian-American bureau chief in India. She is the winner of the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting, the Ramnath Goenka Award and other honors. She lives in New York City. The End of Karma is her first book.
Sreemathi Ramnath is a communications and leadership consultant, writer and media person who works in three languages: Telugu, English and German. As the founder and principal consultant of Immer Besser Consultancy, she is retained by business houses in India, Europe and Southeast Asia, lectures at premier educational institutions and is a faculty member with several corporate academies across the world. Sreemathi has taught at various Goethe Instituts in India and abroad and has co-authored a book on teaching methods and curriculum for advanced German Courses. An empanelled speaker and scriptwriter for Telugu documentaries at Films Division of India, Sreemathi has written and spoken for several documentaries. She was the first TV anchor for Telugu programmes in Chennai DD. She is passionate about Telugu literature, and speaks regularly at various literary fora — both Telugu and non-Telugu. Her book Achtung! Germans at Work, written with Dr.Wolfgang Messner, is awaiting publication.
Sreenivasa Murthy a mechanical engineer from Bengaluru, has served in leadership positions as a quality professional in MNCs both in India and Europe. His father was a Harikatha exponent and his elder brother an exploring musician and a poet who influenced Sreenivasa and introduced him to Carnatic classical music and appreciation of art and literature. Listening to music with an objective of understanding its lyrics, musical content and the emotion it contains has been an integral part of his life. His passion for recording many music concerts over the last 40 years and quest for finding heritage recordings inspired him to work on the restoration and remastering of old recordings for posterity. He has restored hundreds of heritage concerts and shared it with aficionados of music worldwide. Recognising his contribution, Sangeethapriya — an organisation dedicated to storage, preservation and posterity of classical music — conferred on him the Rasikapriya award in 2016.
Sriram V has an engineering degree and an MBA under his belt but is better known for his passionate interest in Chennai’s history and Carnatic Music. He writes frequently on these subjects for The Hindu (where he has two columns – Encore, a monthly and Hidden Histories, a weekly) and Madras Musings. He is the author of over 10 books, among them Carnatic Summer; The Devadasi and The Saint: the Life and Times of Bangalore Nagarathnamma; and Fifty Historic Residences of Chennai. He pioneered the concept of heritage walks in the city in 1999 and his thematic tours of the city, on the third Sunday of each month, have become very popular. In 2014 Sriram launched Chennai Past Forward, a mobile application that makes people aware of the heritage in their surroundings.
Subashree Krishnaswamy is an editor, translator and writer. She has translated The Tamil Story: Through the Times, Through the Tides, an anthology of Tamil short fiction, edited by Dilip Kumar. She edited the Indian Review of Books, a monthly magazine devoted to reviews of books, for a number of years. Her book, The Babel Guide to South Indian Fiction in Translation was published by Babel Books, UK. She edited and translated an anthology of Tamil poetry, Rapids of a Great River (Penguin) along with Lakshmi Holmström and K Srilata. She also collaborated with K Srilata on the book Short Fiction from South India (OUP). She is an adjunct professor at the Asian College of Journalism and lives in Chennai.
Suhasini Haidar is the Diplomatic Editor of The Hindu, who writes on Foreign policy issues, and hosts a weekly online show “WorldView with Suhasini Haidar”. Prior to this, she was Foreign Affairs editor and prime time anchor in a leading private news channel. Over the course of her nearly-three-decades of reporting career, she has covered the most challenging stories & conflicts from the most diverse regions including Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Libya, Lebanon and Syria. In India, she has covered the foreign affairs beat for over a decade and her domestic assignments include political profiles and in-depth reportage from conflict zones including Kashmir, where she was injured in a bomb blast in 2000. She is a receipient of the ‘Prem Bhatia’ award in 2015, and has won a series of awards for her work.
Sukirtharani is a Tamil poet who fights the caste system and the plight of women who are oppressed by it through her works. She has six collections of poetry to her credit: Kaipattri Yen Kanavu Kel, Iravu Mirugam, Kaamatthipoo, Theendapadaatha Muttham, Avalai Mozhipeyarthal and Ippadikku Yeval. Her awards include Thevamagal Kavithoovi Award, the Puthumaipitthan Memorial Award and the Women’s Achiever Award by the Pengal Munnani (Women’s Front). Many of her poems are taught in colleges across the State and have been translated into languages such as English, Malayalam, Kannada, Hindi and German. The much-appreciated short film Kannadi Meen, was based on her poem ‘Appavin Nyabagamaradhi’. She was featured in the well-received documentary film SheWrite, which featured three other Tamil poets. Sukirtharani lives in the Ranipettai district of Vellore and teaches Tamil at the Government Girls High School. She plays an active role as a feminist and social activist. She is currently writing a novel on Dalit life.
Sunil Khilnani is author of The Idea of India (6th Edn, 2016) and, most recently, Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives (2016), accompanied by his 50-part BBC radio and podcast and radio series. Among his other publications are Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (1993), several collaborative volumes, as well as essays on Gandhi, Tagore, Nehru and contemporary Indian art and photography. He is currently Avantha Professor and Director of the India Institute at King’s College London. He has been a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge; the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC; the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin; and the American Academy in Berlin. He is a regular contributor of essays, articles and reviews to the international media.
Suseela Anand an advocate, practised in the High Court of Madras for six years and extended her service in the development sector for more than 13 years. She has worked in areas like advocacy on Right to Education, Health, Human Rights, especially women and child rights. She has developed the curriculum for the Indira Gandhi National Open University School on Gender and Development Studies. She is a speaker, writer, translator, torchbearer of women empowerment, and has varied interests including theatre and drama. She is a resource person for various national organisations working for women’s rights and empowerment. She has participated in television debates and spoken widely speeches about feminism, women and child rights, and social justice.
SUSHILA RAVINDRANATH joined Business India in Mumbai as a staff writer when business was still a bad word and and Business Week famously called the country an elephant on an oil spill. She moved to Chennai in the mid 1980s and has done stories on many South Indian groups, which were publicity-shy and had never been written about. She set up Business India bureaus in all the Southern cities. She helped launch Hansazone website, an entertainment portal for R K Swamy BBDO, before she moved to the New Sunday Express as its editor. She is now a consulting editor for Financial Express and is completing a book on post-liberalisation Tamil Nadu.
T SUMATHY (DR) also known as Thamizhachi Thangapandian was a Senior-Grade Lecturer in English at Queen Mary’s College, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, from 1996-2008. As a research scholar, she was the recipient of the Prestigious AIC (Australia-India Council) Fellow Award (2004). Acclaimed as a Tamil poet, her areas of interest include post-colonial literature (especially Sri Lankan and Australian), diasporic literature (especially Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora), translation, criticism and performing arts (Tamil Theatre). Currently, she is a freelance writer and a performer. She has to her credit 12 publications in Tamil and one in English.
Talia Kurlansky is a 16-year-old New York High school student. Between the ages of nine and 12, she wrote International Night with her father, Mark Kurlansky and is currently working on a Young Adult novel about ballet, which is her passion.
Tishani Doshi is a poet, novelist and dancer based in Chennai. She is a regular contributor to The Hindu.
Uma Tanuku is a director, line producer, occasional cinematographer and film festival curator. She graduated in business management and foreign trade from the University of Madras (1985) and the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (1986). She worked as an officer at an international trading organisation for over a decade. Subsequently, to explore her potential, she studied direction at the Film & Television Institute of India (2001). Since 2001, she has been involved with several documentary projects as a line producer. Her first film Night Hawks (2012), a documentary, was shot in a purely observational style and looks at the city from the perspective of people who work at night and reveals multiple stories that often go unnoticed. Her second film, The Books We Made (2016), co-directed with Anupama Chandra, is a documentary inspired by Kali for Women, the first feminist publishing house in India and focuses on the feminist politics and friendships that made its survival possible. She was the Festival Director the IAWRT Asian Women’s Film Festival for 2016 and has been Festival Co-Director for three years from 2013-15 and a curator of several travelling film festivals.
Urvashi Butalia is an Indian feminist and historian. She is the Director and Co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house. Her writing has appeared in several newspapers including the Guardian, The Statesman, The Times of India, The Hindu and several magazines such as Outlook, New Internationalist and India Today. She was also conferred the Padma Shri award for her contribution to Indian literature in 2011. She is known for her book, The Other Side of Silence which is the product of more than 70 interviews Butalia conducted with survivors of the Partition.
Vairamuthu is a Tamil poet, lyricist and author. He has written over 40 books, some of which have been translated into other languages. He has written over 7000 lyrics for films and has won the National Award for Best Lyricist six times and the Tamil Nadu State Award for Best Lyricist Award six times. His works are taught in universities in India and abroad and have been the subject of research. His poems have been translated into Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Russian and Norwegian. The American Library of Congress has preserved his poems recorded in his own voice as a valuable document for posterity. His awards include the Padma Bhushan, Padma Shri, Sahitya Akademi Award (for his novel Kallilkattu Itihasam) and the Kalaimamani Award from the Tamil Nadu Government.
Vaishna Roy is a Sr Deputy Editor with The Hindu, and writes on books, society and culture. She authors a fortnightly column called ‘Woman, Uninterrupted’ in Melange, besides editing the newspaper’s cinema and property supplements
Vasuki U is the National Vice-President of All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) and a Central Committee Member of the CPI(M). She works actively on many social and political issues such as violence against women and children, food security, caste oppression, honour killings among others. She successfully led a struggle against Coca Cola setting up a factory at Padamathur, Sivagangai district of Tamil Nadu. She has served as a resource person on gender equality to the police force, district judges and various NGOs and is a member of the Police Advisory Committee in Chennai. She was the anchor person for Magalir Panchayathu in Pothigai TV, a programme on issues related to women’s right.
Vasuki U is the National Vice-President of All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) and a Central Committee Member of the CPI(M). She works actively on many social and political issues such as violence against women and children, food security, caste oppression, and honour killings among others. She successfully led a struggle against Coca Cola setting up a factory at Padamathur, Sivagangai district of Tamil Nadu. She has served as a resource person on gender equality to the police force, district judges and various NGOs and is a member of the Police Advisory Committee in Chennai. She was the anchor person for Magalir Panchayathu in Pothigai TV, a programme on issues related to women’s rights.
SRIDHAR, VIKRAM is a storyteller connecting the age old oral tradition in a contemporary form to the new age listeners. He performs regularly across Bangalore and Chennai. He is a theatre practitioner and has been in the English theatre space working with various groups for about 7 years. His theatre group, Tahatto, performs regularly at various spaces and festivals across India. Around the Story Tree is his initiative to reach out to children and adults across various backgrounds through storytelling, using folktales in a contemporary form to connect with listeners to the environment around us. More about his work https://www.facebook.com/AroundTheStoryTree
Vivek Karunakaran is one of Chennai’s consistent voices on fashion. He created his own space in a burgeoning market with a design vocabulary that refocuses attention on clean cuts and structured silhouettes. A regular at national pageants, he worked towards securing Chennai’s position in a larger fashionscape. He was recently voted one of the 50 Best Dressed Men in India by GQ magazine. The roster of celebrities he has styled includes Christian Louboutin, Ranveer Singh, Sonam Kapoor, Anil Kapoor, A. R. Rahman, Amy Jackson and Leander Paes. In his 15-year engagement with design, this ex-NIFTian has put together collections for many American and European brands, besides taking his eponymous label beyond Chennai to Bangalore, Mumbai, Riyadh, Dubai and Singapore.
Vivek Shanbhag writes in Kannada. He has published five short story collections, three novels and two plays, and has edited two anthologies, one of them in English. For seven years from 2005 to 2012, he published and edited the literary journal Desha Kaala. His acclaimed novel Ghachar Ghochar was published in English translation in 2015. He was a Fall 2016 resident at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. An engineer by training, Vivek Shanbhag lives in Bengaluru.
Wendy Were was appointed to the Executive of the Australia Council in January 2014. She was previously CEO at West Australian Music, Business Advisor with the Centre of Creative Industries Innovation Centre, and Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Sydney Writers’ Festival. Wendy also holds a PhD in Literature. Wendy has wide-ranging experience in arts management, curation and business development and a track record in championing the development of sustainable career paths for Australia’s artistic workers.
Y Manikandan Professor of Tamil at the University of Madras, is an authority on Tamil prosody. A scholar-editor, he has worked extensively on Tamil palmleaf manuscripts. Manikandan’s longstanding interest is in the life and writings of two of Tamil’s greatest poets, Subramania Bharati and Bharatidasan. Manikandan has written/edited over thirty-five books in Tamil and is the recipient of the President of India’s Young Scholar Award for contribution to classical Tamil (2005-06).
K Kalpana is Assistant Professor at the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, IIT Madras. She has written extensively on gender, poverty, women’s labour and microcredit. She is the author of Women, Microfinance and the State in Neo-liberal India. She has been an activist with people’s science movements and has organised women’s microcredit (Self Help Group) federations and ‘Right to Health’ campaigns that included public audits of rural primary health centers and women’s health status. She is currently an Executive Committee member of the Indian Association of Women’s Studies. She participates actively in Tamil feminist theatre as well as in workshops and campaigns for gender equality organized by women’s rights movements and NGOs.
