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Contributors

Ajay Joshi is a theatre journalist. He has translated numerous Marathi plays into English, and has written two books on theatre. He lives in Pune.

Ashish A. Naik was one of the students in the course conducted by Oriijit Sen titled “Digging Deeper — Creating short comics about the story of mining in Goa” at the University of Goa.

Avtar Singh Sandhu, known by his pen name Pash, is a poet and revolutionary. His first collection of poems Loh Kath (The Iron Story) came out in 1970, while he was still in jail. After his release, he published Uddade Bazan Magar (Behind Flying Hawks), Sade Samian Vich (In Our Times). He was assassinated on 23rd March 1988.

Chandrakant Patil is a Marathi poet, critic, translator and editor who has also written 15 books in Hindi. He is the recipient of several national and regional awards. He lives in Pune.

Chaman Lal was Professor in Hindi Translation at the Centre of Indian Languages in Jawaharlal Nehru University. He compiled Pash’s collected poems in Punjabi and translated them into Hindi; the translations won the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize. He returned the award in 2015 to protest against growing intolerance in the country.

Darshan Butter has written seven collections of poetry. He received the Sahitya Akademi award for his poetry collection Mahakambni (The Great Shivering). His poems have been translated into Hindi, Urdu, English and other languages. He returned the award in 2015 to protest against growing intolerance in the country.

Deepali Sawant was one of the students in the course conducted by Oriijit Sen titled “Digging Deeper — Creating short comics about the story of mining in Goa” held at the University of Goa.

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 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.

Farid Mohammad Mansuri is a bilingual poet. He writes in Gujarati and Urdu, and has adopted the pen name Adil. He moved from Gujarat to Pakistan with his family at the time of partition, only to return again to live in the city of Ahmedabad. His family finally moved to the USA in 1985. He is also an accomplished calligrapher.

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 githahariharan.com.

Gopika Jadeja is a poet and translator. She publishes and edits a journal and a series of pamphlets for a performance-publishing project called Five Issues. Her work has been published in Asymptote, The Wolf, Indian Literature, Vahi, Sahcharya and elsewhere. She is currently working on English translations of poetry from Gujarat.

Gopika Nath is a textile artist and craftsperson working toward redefining the value of hand-crafting in India. She is a Fulbright Scholar and alumnus of the Central St. Martins School of Art and Design, UK. She is also an art critic, blogger, poet and teacher.

Jaswinder is the author six collectons of poetry. He received the Sahitya Akademi award in 2014 for his collection of ghazals called Agarbatti. He returned the award in 2015 to protest against growing intolerance in the country. He lives in Canada.

Jitish Kallat’s solo presentations include “Circa” at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia (2012); “Fieldnotes: Tomorrow was here Yesterday” at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, India (2011); “Likewise” at Arndt, Berlin, Germany (2010); “The Astronomy of the Subway” at Haunch of Venison, London, UK (2010); “Aquasaurus” at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Paddington, Australia (2008) and “Lonely Facts” at the Kunsthalle Luckenwalde, Luckenwalde, Germany (1998). He was a curator for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India in 2014.

Jyoti B. Jankar was one of the students in the course conducted by Orijit Sen titled “Digging Deeper — creating short comics about the story of mining in Goa” held at the University of Goa.

Lal Singh Dil (1943-2007) was born in a dalit family in Ludhiana district in 1943. He was part of the Naxalite movement and was arrested by the police. His first poetry is Bahut Sare Suraj (Many Suns), published in 1971. He went on to write his autobiography Dastan. His poetry has been translated into Hindi, Urdu and English. A selection of his translations and memoirs, Poet of the Revolution, was published in English in 2012.

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. For more on the author and his work see satchidanandan.com.

Kareem James Abu-Zeid is a prolific and award-winning translator of poets and novelists from across the Arab world. He is currently completing his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on spirituality and modern poetry. He is also translating Najwan Darwish’s second book.

Krishna Mohan Shrimali was Professor of History at the University of Delhi. He has written several research monographs and papers on ancient Indian history and archaeology. He was President of the Ancient Indian History Section, Indian History Congress; General President of Numismatic Society of India; and History Congresses of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and West Bengal. He was also Secretary of the Indian History Congress from 1992 to 1995.

Mini Krishnan is Editor, Translations, at Oxford University Press. She sources and edits fiction, plays, autobiographies and biographies from 12 Indian languages into English. She was formerly with Macmillan India where she edited the Modern Indian Novels in Translation series. So far she has edited 62 literary translations, four of which have won the Crossword Award for translation. She is an advocate of translation education in universities and colleges and is on the National Translation Mission, which operates under the National Knowledge Commission. She is Founding Editor of the South Asian Women Writers Website hosted by the British Council and was also literary advisor to The Hindu from 1992 to 1998.

Makarand Sathe, an architect by profession, has been writing plays, novels and articles in Marathi for the last three decades. His plays have been performed in many national and international festivals. His works have been translated into English, French, Russian and many Indian languages. His three-volume socio-political history of Marathi theatre was published by Oxford University Press in 2015.

Mamang Dai is a poet and novelist from Arunachal Pradesh. She is a former journalist and was President of the Arunachal Pradesh Union of Working Journalists. Her poetry, fiction and articles have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. She also worked with the World Wide Fund for Nature in the Eastern Himalaya Biodiversity Hotspots programme. She lives in Itanagar.

Orijit Sen is a graphic artist, cartoonist, muralist and designer. He is 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.

Pradnya Gaonkar was one of the students in the course conducted by Oriijit Sen titled “Digging Deeper — Creating short comics about the story of mining in Goa” held at the University of Goa.

Rahman Abbas’ novels include Nakhlistan Ki Talash (In Search of an Oasis), Ek Mamnua Muhabbat Ki Kahani (The Story of Forbidden Love), Khud Ke Saaye Mein Ankh Micholi (Hide and Seek in the Shadow of God) and Rohzin (The Melancholy of Souls). His collection of essays is called Ekkiswin Sadi Men Urdu Novel aur Digar Mazameen (Urdu Novel in the Twenty-First Century and Other Essays). He was awarded the Fiction Award in 2011 for Khuda Ke Saaye Mein Ankh Micholi by the State Academy of Maharashtra.

Randi L. Clary is a doctoral student in the Religious Studies department focusing on Sikh Studies at the University of Califorinia, Santa Barbara. She completed her M.A. at Rice University in Religious Studies. Her dissertation is on Bhai Vir Singh and gender, focusing on the tracts she translated while in India on a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant.

Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, cultural theorist and curator. His collections of poems include Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 and Die Ankunft der Vögel. His translation of the poems of the fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded. He is the editor of Dom Moraes: Selected Poems, the first annotated critical edition of a major Anglophone Indian poet’s work.

Saba Hasan is a multidisciplinary artist working on book installations, photographs, paintings, videos and sound since 1998. She has an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology with certification in art/ art history from the Ecole D’Arts Visuels, Lausanne, and Cambridge University. Her work was showcased at the 55th Venice Biennale at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, as part of the Imago Mundi Collection (2013).  She received the Raza National Award for painting in 2005 and international fellowships for the “Book of Disquiet” from Syracuse University, New York, the French Cultural Ministry, Paris (2006), the George Keyt Foundation (2002) and the Oscar Kokoschka Academy, Salzburg (2010).

Sabika Abbas is a poet, short-story writer, and translator. She is a graduate in History from the Lady Shri Ram College for Women (LSR) and a postgraduate in Conflict Transformation and Peace Building from the ASSK Centre for Peace, LSR.  She is currently pursuing an M.A. in Modern Indian History from the Department of Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi. She has worked with the Youth Forum for Foreign Policy Adhay and Pehchan, Chehel, and Sandrishti.

S.G. Vasudev obtained his diploma from the Government College of Arts in Chennai. He has won several awards, including the National Award from the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi. His works have been included in important national collections and have travelled widely all over the world. He is one of the founder members of the Cholamandal Artists’ Village in Chennai. He lives and works in Bangalore.

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 shoilikanungo.art.

Shubha Mudgal is a singer of Hindustani classical music. She was awarded the 1996 National Film Award for Best Non-Feature Film Music Direction for “Amrit Beej”; the 1998 Gold Plaque Award for Special Achievement in Music, at the 34th Chicago International Film Festival, for her music in the film Dance of the Wind (1997); and the Padma Shri in 2000. Her first guru was Pandit Ramashreya Jha, in Allahabad. After completing inter-college, she moved to New Delhi and enrolled at Delhi University for her undergraduate studies. In Delhi she continued her musical education under Pandit Vinay Chandra Maudgalya.

Subhro Bandhopadhyay is the author of four books of poetry, one of which fetched him the Indian National Award for Young Writers (Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar) in 2013. Two of them were translated into Spanish and published in Spain. He has written a biography of Pablo Neruda in Bengali, and also received the Antonio Machado International Poetry Fellowship from the Government of Spain.

Surjit Patar’s first collection of ghazals is called Hava Vich Likhe Harf (Words Written in Air); he is one of most celebrated Punjabi poets at the present. He was given the Sahitya Akademi award for his poetry collection Hanere vich Sulgadi Varnmala (The Alphabets Smouldering in Darkness) in 1994. He returned the award in 2015 to protest against growing intolerance in the country.

Susanket Sawant was one of the students in the course conducted by Oriijit Sen titled “Digging Deeper — Creating short comics about the story of mining in Goa” held at the University of Goa.

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, the UK. She lived and worked in Chennai from 1981 to 1997 and in Baroda between 1997 and 2013. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Design and Performing Arts at Shiv Nadar University, Dadri.

Vishnu Khare is a prominent Hindi poet, critic, journalist, translator and film critic. He also writes in English. He was formerly editor of Navbharat Times and an assistant editor of The Times of India. He has translated two major European epics into Hindi, and written six collections of poetry, a book of criticism and over 20 books of translations in Hindi, German, and other German-dominated European languages. He lives in Mumbai and Chhindwada.