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Contributors

Arpana Caur has had solo exhibitions in museums all over the world, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and Museums of Modern Art in numerous cities. She won the Gold medal in the VIth International Triennale 1986, and was commissioned by the Hiroshima Museum of Modern Art for its 50th anniversary in 1995. Since 1981, she has worked on large non-commercial murals in Delhi, Bengaluru, Hamburg and Kathmandu. For more on her work, see www.arpanacaur.com.

Bolwar Mahamad Kunhi, a highly respected award-winning writer of fiction in Kannada, was the first to introduce the language, customs and traditions of a small Muslim community of coastal Karnataka into Kannada literature. He weaves in the syncretic culture of this region into his fiction. His two major novels are Swatantrada Ota (The March to Freedom), and Odiri (Read), a fictionalised biography of the Prophet Mohammed. The latter book went into its second reprint within four days of publication.

E. P. Unny is a well-known cartoonist who has worked for a range of newspapers, from The Hindu in Chennai to The Sunday Mail, The Economic Times and The Indian Express, where he is currently the Chief Political Cartoonist. His most recent publication is Business As Usual, Journey of the Indian Express Cartoonist. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Indian Institute of Cartoonists in 2009.

E. V. Ramakrishnan has published poetry and literary criticism in Malayalam and English. He has three volumes of poetry in English, and several critical works in both English and Malayalam. The latter includes Aksharavum Aadhunikatayum, for which he was awarded the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award. He is presently Professor Emeritus in the School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies at the Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar.

Githa Hariharan has written fiction, essays and columns over the last three decades. Her most recent book is Almost Home, Cities and Other Places. For more on the author and her work, see www.githahariharan.com.

Janice Pariat is the author of a collection of short stories, Boats on Land, and a novel, Seahorse. She was awarded the Young Writer Award by the Sahitya Akademi, and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction in 2013. Her art reviews, cultural features, book reviews, fiction and poetry have featured in a wide selection of national magazines and newspapers. She is a literary columnist for The Hindu BLInk. She was the Charles Wallace Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, in 2014.

Jaspreet Singh is an award-winning novelist and short story writer based in Canada. His latest novel, Helium, on the November 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, has been called a “powerful meditation on historical forgetting”. Helium was an Observer Book of the Year in the UK.

K. Satchidanandan is a widely translated Malayalam poet and a bilingual writer, translator and editor. His most recent works, available in English, are While I Write and Misplaced Objects and Other Poems.

Kanchan Chander studied printmaking and painting at art colleges in New Delhi, Santiago, Berlin, and Paris. She received the International Print Biennale Award, Bradford, UK, in 1986. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions all over the world. For more on her work, see http://kanchansartworks.net/.

Keerti Ramachandra is a teacher by training, aptitude, and inclination; and a freelance editor and translator by virtue of being multilingual. Her translation of a Marathi novel, A Dirge for the Damned, was shortlisted for the Crossword Award in 2015.

Keki N. Daruwalla writes poetry and fiction, and lives in Delhi. His novel Ancestral Affairs was recently published by HarperCollins. He won the Commonwealth Poetry Award (Asia) for his poetry volume Landscapes.

Madhavikutty (Kamala Das) (1934-2009) was an iconoclastic award-winning Indian poet in English, and a fiction writer in Malayalam, besides being famous for her autobiography My Story in English, and her memoirs in Malayalam. She wrote six collections of poetry in English, including Summer in Calcutta; in Malayalam, she wrote three novels and 11 collections of short stories.

Mangalesh Dabral, a celebrated Hindi poet, has published five books of poems, two collections of literary essays and socio-cultural commentary, a book of conversations, and a travelogue on his experiences in Iowa, where he was a fellow of the International Writing Program in 1991. He has received numerous awards, including the Shamsher Sammaan (1995), the Pahal Sammaan (1998) and the Sahitya Akademi Award (2000).

Manohar Shetty has published seven books of poems, including Domestic Creatures and Living Room.  His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, The Common, Chelsea, Atlanta Review and The Baffler in the US, and in The London Magazine, Poetry Review and Poetry Wales in the UK, and have also been widely anthologised. He has lived in Goa since 1985.

Meena Alexander has recently published her eighth book of poems, Atmospheric Embroidery. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry, and her works include the PEN Award-winning Illiterate Heart. In 2014, she was a National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. She is Distinguished Professor of English, Graduate Centre, Hunter College, CUNY. For more on her work, see www.meenaalexander.com.

Meena Kandasamy is a poet and writer based in Chennai.

Merlin Moli, a Delhi-based artist, has three decades of sculpting experience with various materials. She has participated in exhibitions in India and elsewhere.

M. K. Raghavendra is a film scholar and critic. He received the National Award (the Swarna Kamal) for Best Film Critic in 1997. He has authored three volumes of academic film criticism – Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema, Bipolar Identity: Region, Nation and the Kannada Language Film and The Politics of Hindi Cinema in the New Millennium: Bollywood and the Anglophone Indian Nation. He has also written two books on cinema for the general reader, 50 Indian Film Classics and Director’s Cut: 50 Film-makers of the Modern Era.

Orijit Sen is a graphic artist, cartoonist, muralist and designer. He is the author of the graphic novel River of Stories, as well as many other works of graphic fiction and non-fiction. He is one of the founders of People Tree – a collaborative studio and store for artists, designers and craftspeople. Sen is also Mario Miranda Chair Visiting Professor at Goa University.

Priya Kurian is a children’s book illustrator, comic book artist and animator. A graduate of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, she has directed educational films for the Sesame Street show (India) and the Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI), and illustrated numerous children’s books for various Indian publishers. She currently lives in New Delhi, filling her sketchbooks with caricatures of its residents. For more of her work, see priyakuriyan.blogspot.com and pkuriyan.blogspot.com.

Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s five books include a novel, two poetry collections, speculative fiction, non-fiction in collaboration with photographer Christopher Taylor and, recently, translations from the Tamil, including Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess, co-translated with Ravi Shankar. She edits Poetry at Sangam http://poetry.sangamhouse.org/. For more on her work, see www.priyawriting.com.

Pushpamala N. has been called “the most entertaining artist-iconoclast of contemporary Indian art”. In her sharp and witty work as a sculptor, writer, curator and provocateur, and in her collaborations with writers, theatre directors and filmmakers, she seeks to subvert the dominant discourse. She lives in Bengaluru.

Sajitha Shankar was a member of the Lalit Kala Akademi, Kerala, and on the governing body of Vyloppilly Sanskriti Bhavan. She has served as a member of the jury for several art exhibitions. She has had numerous solo shows around the world, and is also the founder-director of an innovative centre for art at Kallar – the Gowri Art Institute. She works at the Garhi Studios of the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi.

Salil Chaturvedi writes short fiction and poetry in English and Hindi. He lives in Chorao, an island in Goa, with his wife, a cat, and a dog.

Sarabjeet Garcha is a bilingual poet, editor and translator. He has published a book of poems in Hindi and two books in English, the latest being Lullaby of the Ever-Returning. He received a Junior Fellowship in Hindi literature from the Ministry of Culture in 2011. Sarabjeet is the co-founder and director of Copper Coin (www.coppercoin.co.in), a multilingual independent publishing company.

Shoili Kanungo is a graphic designer, illustrator and visual artist. She has worked on a range of communication design projects in Sydney and New Delhi. She is currently visiting faculty at the School of Planning and Architecture. For more on her work, see http://www.shoilikanungo.art.

Vasudha Thozhur was born in 1956 in Mysore. She studied at the College of Arts and Crafts, Madras, and at the School of Art and Design in Croydon, UK. She lived and worked in Chennai between 1981–1997 and in Baroda between 1997–2013. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Design and Performing Arts at Shiv Nadar University, Dadri.