Priya Sarukkai Chabria

Priya Sarukkai Chabria is an award winning translator, poet and writer acclaimed for her radical literary aesthetics. Her books include speculative fiction, literary non-fiction, two poetry collections, a novel and translations from Classical Tamil of the mystic Andal’s songs. Awarded for her Outstanding Contribution to Literature by the Indian government, she has attended prestigious writers’ residencies and presented her work worldwide; it’s widely anthologised. She edited possibly the largest archive of Indian Anglophone poetry Talking Poetry (India) and now edits Poetry at Sangam. http://poetry.sangamhouse.org. Another version of her speculative fiction novel titled Clone is forthcoming with Zubaan, New Delhi in 2018 and University of Chicago Press, 2019; the French translation by Editions Banyan is scheduled for 2019. Also forthcoming in 2018 (Ed.) Fafnir’s Heart World Poetry in Translation with Bombaykala Books. She’s translating sacred songs from Old Tamil. www.priyawriting.com

The Twilight Is Yellow
The Clone

Sampurna Chattarji

Sampurna Chattarji is a poet, fiction-writer and translator. Her fifteen books include the poetry titles Absent Muses (Poetrywala, 2010); The Scorpion (HarperXXI, 2013) and Space Gulliver: Chronicles of an Alien (HarperCollins, 2015); the novels Rupture and Land of the Well (both from HarperCollins); a short-story collection about Bombay/Mumbai, Dirty Love (Penguin, 2013); and a translation of Joy Goswami’s Selected Poems (Harper Perennial, 2014, 2018). She has co-authored Elsewhere Where Else/ Lle Arall Ble Arall with Eurig Salisbury and is currently Poetry Editor of The Indian Quarterly.

Devi

Charles Adès Fishman

Charles Fishman’s books include The Death Mazurka, which was nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and In the Language of Women (2011), recipient of the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. The revised, second edition of his anthology, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, was published in 2007 by Time Being Books, which released his Selected Poems, In the Path of Lightning, in 2012. Charles is poetry editor of Prism: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators and, with Smita Sahay of Mumbai, India, co-edited Veils, Halos & Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women. His most recent collection is In the Wake of the Glacier: New Selected Poems (Kasva Press, 2018).

Four Poems by Charles Adès Fishman

Dipika Mukherjee

Dipika Mukherjee has her home in Chicago but trawls the world for fabulous stories and smelly food (the durian is a favourite). You can read about her work at www.dipikamukherjee.com.

Four Poems by Dipika Mukherjee

Menka Shivdasani

Menka Shivdasani is the author of four collections of poetry, with her most recent being Frazil (1980 – 2017). She has edited two anthologies of contemporary Indian poetry for the American e-zine www.bigbridge.org, and an anthology of women’s writing, If the Roof Leaks, Let it Leak (SPARROW). She is co-translator of Freedom and Fissures, an anthology of Sindhi Partition poetry (Sahitya Akademi). She has been conducting a four-day poetry festival in Mumbai for the global movement 100 Thousand Poets for Change since 2012, and in 1986, she had played a key role in founding the Poetry Circle in Mumbai. Her work as a journalist includes 14 books as co-author/ editor.

Three Poems by Menka Shivdasani

Arundhathi Subramaniam

Arundhathi Subramaniam is the author of four books of poems, most recently When God Is a Traveller (Bloodaxe Books, 2014) and Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2009). Her prose works include the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic Sadhguru: More Than a Life, Penguin and Book of Buddha, Penguin Books (reprinted several times). As editor, she has worked on a Penguin anthology of essays on sacred journeys in the country (Pilgrim’s India), and a Sahitya Akademi anthology of Post-Independence Indian Poetry in English (Another Country). She has co-edited a Penguin anthology of contemporary Indian love poems in English (Confronting Love).

Three Poems by Arundhati Subramaniam

Laura Traister

Laura Traister served as a Fulbright-Nehru English Teaching Assistant in Mumbai in 2016–17 but now lives in the mountains of North Carolina, USA, where she works as a textbook editor. Her poems and essays have been published in the US, UK, and now India. In addition to reading and writing, she enjoys traveling, connecting to nature through daily walks, and bouncing between practicing Spanish and Hindi. You can read more about her work and contact her through LinkedIn.

Two Poems by Laura Traister

Sophia Naz

Sophia Naz is a bilingual poet, essayist, author, editor and translator. he has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, in 2016 for creative nonfiction and in 2018 for poetry. Her work features in numerous literary journals, including Poetry International Rotterdam, The Adirondack Review, The Wire, Chicago Quarterly Review, Blaze Vox, Scroll, The Daily O, Cafe Dissensus, Guftugu, Pratik, Gallerie International, Coldnoon, VAYAVYA, The Bangalore Review, Madras Courier, etc. Her Urdu/Hindi poetry appears in the anthology Raushniyan(2018). Her poetry collections are Peripheries (2015) Pointillism (2017) and Date Palms (2017). Naz is a regular contributor to Dawn, Poetry Editor and columnist at The Sunflower Collective, editor of the journal City, as well as the founder of rekhti.org, a site dedicated to contemporary Urdu poetry by women. Shehnaz, a biography on her mother's life is forthcoming from Penguin Random House in 2019. www.trancelucence.net.

Three Poems by Sophia Naz

Anjali Purohit

Anjali Purohit is an artist, writer, poet, translator and curator. She is the author of two books, Ragi Ragini: Chronicles from Aji’s Kitchen (Yoda Press, 2012) and Go Talk to the River: the Ovis of Bahinabai Choudhari (Yoda Press, 2019). Her writing has featured in several anthologies and literary journals including International Gallerie, Coldnoon, Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry II, Four Quarters Magazine, Indian Cultural Forum: Guftugu, The Bombay Review, Antiserious, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Desilit, Chowk, Teksto, Indian Writing from Around the World, Urban Voice Indiaand Suvarnarekha. She is the founder and curator of The Cappuccino Adda. She is presently working on her forthcoming book of poetry.

Songs of the Soil - Ovis by Bahinabai Chaudhary Translated by Anjali Purohit

Bahinabai Choudhary

Bahinabai Choudhary (1880-1950) was an unlettered peasant poet from the Khandesh region of Maharashtra who has authored a collection of poems in the form of ovis. An ovi is verse in couplet form that are set to an easy tune and sung by women in this state as they go about their work. So, in a sense, they can be regarded as ‘work songs’ not unlike the blues. However, while most ovis that have been popularly sung were about God, stories and characters from mythology, festivals or moral precepts, Bahinabai’s ovis were about her work both in the home as well as a farmer; they were about the village, people around her, incidents and about her maher (maikaor her childhood home that she missed so much having been married at the age of 13 (as most girls were in that period) and sent to her saasar (sasural or matrimonial home).

Bahinabai is not remarkable only because she ‘wrote’ (authored) these poems inspite of being unschooled but, to me, she is exceptional because she was perhaps the first Marathi poet to have written so well and so consistently about a woman’s work and experience. Her ovis also show us how she coped with adversity and reveal to us the personality of a woman of great resolve who took life head on, turned it into song and, in doing so, left us a treasure in the form of her ovis that were at once simple, earthy, full of with and also deeply meaningful.

Songs of the Soil - Ovis by Bahinabai Chaudhary Translated by Anjali Purohit

Suchi Govindarajan

Suchi Govindarajan works as a technical writer and pretends to be a photographer. In her spare time, she enjoys writing humour pieces and poetry. She hates brinjals. You can read her work at http://www.suchiswriting.com. She also posts as @suchiswriting on Instagram.

Of blood and war by Suchi Govindarajan

Jayanta Mahapatra

Jayanta Mahapatra (1928) is a bilingual poet and has published over 40 volumes of poetry in English and Odia, translations, short stories, essays, and memoirs, and has been featured in numerous anthologies. In the late seventies, he founded and edited Chandrabhaga, a literary magazine dedicated to Indian writing. The first Indian poet writing in English to be awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry in 1982, he is also the recipient of numerous awards and honours, such as, the Jacob Glatstein Memorial Award for Poetry in 1975, the Allen Tate Poetry Prize from The Sewanee Review, the SAARC Literary Award, and the Padma Sri by the President of India in 2009, which he returned in 2015 as a mark of protest against the growing ‘moral asymmetry’ in the country. In 2017, he was awarded the Kanhaiyalal Lifetime Poetry Award at the Jaipur Literature Festival. He currently lives in Cuttack, Orissa.

Four Poems by Jayanta Mahapatra

Suneetha Balakrishnan

Suneetha Balakrishnan is a writer, translator and journalist working in English and Malayalam. She lives in Thiruvananthapuram, her hometown.

Missing - A Tapestry of Absences

Ranjit Hoskote

Ranjit Hoskote is a leading Anglophone Indian poet, and has also been acclaimed as a seminal contributor to Indian art criticism.He is the author of 30 books, including Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin 2006),Central Time (Penguin/ Viking 2014), and Jonahwhale(Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton 2018); and the monographs Zinny & Maidagan: Compartment/ Das Abteil (Museum fürModerneKunst, Frankfurt/ Walther König 2010) and AtulDodiya (Prestel 2014). He has translated the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded’s poetry as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics 2011). He curated India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011).

THE EXTREME OCCASIONS OF THE PROSTHETIC SELF

Nancy Adajania

Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist and curator based in Bombay. Since the late 1990s, she has written consistently on the practices of four generations of Indian women artists. Her book, The Thirteenth Place: Positionality as Critique in the Art of Navjot Altaf (The Guild Art Gallery, 2016), goes beyond the mandate of a conventional artist monograph to map the larger histories of the Leftist and feminist movements in India. She was the juror for Video/Film/New Media fellowship cycle of the Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015 - 2017). She will be curating a retrospective of the artist Navjot Altaf at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay, in December 2018.

Khwabistan

Aparna Karthikeyan

Aparna Karthikeyan is a writer, an independent journalist and a volunteer at the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). Aparna was awarded the 2015 National Media Award by the National Foundation for India for her work on "Vanishing livelihoods of rural Tamil Nadu".

Small farmer, big heart, miracle bike

Gauri Lankesh

Gauri Lankesh (1962-2017) was the editor of the Gauri Lankesh Patrike. Starting her career as an English language print journalist, she worked for the Times of India, Sunday magazine and the chief of bureau, ETV News, New Delhi, in the 1990s. In 2000, after her father P. Lankesh's death, she took over the editorship of Lankesh Patrike, the weekly tabloid that he had founded in 1980. She became a recognizable figure in the social movements of Karnataka after joining the Karnataka Communal Harmony Forum in 2003. As an activist and journalist, she stood at the forefront of several struggles for justice, equality and love. She was shot dead outside her home in Bengaluru on 5th September 2017 by unidentified gunmen.

The mirage of an oasis in old age

Chandan Gowda

Chandan Gowda teaches at Azim Premji University, Bangaluru. He has translated U. R. Ananthamurthy's Bara (OUP, 2016) and edited Theatres of Democracy: Selected Essays of Shiv Visvanathan (HarperCollins 2016).

The mirage of an oasis in old age

Tanuj Solanki

Tanuj Solanki’s first novel, Neon Noonwas short-listed for the Tata Lit Live First Book Award. His collection of short stories Diwali in Muzzafarnagarhas been receiving critical acclaim post its release in 2017.His short fiction has been published in the Caravan, Hindu Business Line, DNA, Out of Print, and several other publications. He lives in Mumbai with his wife.

Good People

Xu Xi

Xu Xi is the author of thirteen books, including five novels, six collections of short fiction & essays and most recently Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories, released June 15, 2018 by Signal 8 Press; the memoir Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for a City (2017), as part of Penguin's Hong Kong series for the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China. She is also editor of four anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English. Forthcoming from Nebraska University Press in March 2019 is an essay collection This Fish Is Fowl.

Interview

Indira Chandrasekhar

Indira Chandrasekhar started writing fiction with an increasing focus on the short story upon returning to India after more than seventeen years abroad. She has a PhD in Biophysics and, prior to committing to fiction writing, studied the dynamics of biological membranes at research institutes in India, the United States and Switzerland. Links to her published work are available on her blog. She co-edited the anthology Pangea, Thames River Press, 2012. A collection of her short stories Polymorphism was published by HarperCollins in 2017.

Polymorphism
Interview with Indira Chandrasekhar

Anil Menon

Anil Menon’s short fiction have appeared in a variety of international magazines including Albedo One, Interzone, Interfictions, Jaggery Lit Review, Lakeview Review, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and Strange Horizons. His stories been translated into Chinese, Czech, French, German, Hebrew, and Romanian. His debut YA novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet (Zubaan Books, 2010) was short-listed for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword award and the Carl Baxter Society’s Parallax Prize. Along with Vandana Singh, he co-edited Breaking the Bow (Zubaan Books 2012), an anthology of speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana. His most recent work, Half Of What I Say, (Bloomsbury, 2015) was shortlisted for the 2016 Hindu Literary Award. He currently resides in India and can be reached at: iam@anilmenon.com

Love In An Age of Taxonomy

Namita Waikar

Namita Waikar is a writer, translator, and the Managing Editor of People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). She is a partner in a chemistry databases firm, and has worked as a biochemist and a software project manager. She’s most recently the author of The Long March, a novel, Speaking Tiger Books

The Long March
Interview with Namita Waikar

Madhulika Liddle

Madhulika Liddle is best known as the creator of the fictitious Mughal detective Muzaffar Jang. She also writes short stories and novels in other genres, including humour, feminist issues, and history. In addition, she maintains a blog, www.madhulikaliddle.com, which is devoted to some of her main passions in life: writing, reading, history, old cinema, travel, and food.

Paro

Sucharita Dutta-Asane

Sucharita Dutta-Asane is author and independent book editor. At present she edits the online literary journal Kitaab (www.kitaab.org). In 2018 she published her collection Cast Out and Other Stories. She was the recipient of the inaugural Dastaan Award, 2013, for her short story Rear View. In 2008, she received the Oxford Bookstores debuting writers’ (second) award for her collection The Jungle Stories.
Her short stories have appeared in various national and international anthologies including Juggernaut Books, the Africa-Asia anthology Behind the Shadows (2012); Zubaan Books’ Breaking the Bow, (2012); Unisun Publications’ anthology Vanilla Desires; APK Publishers’ anthology of short stories by Indian women writers titled Ripples. Her stories and book reviews have also appeared in online literary journals including Dwarts (Nigeria), Bhashabandhan Literary Review, The Four Quarters Magazine (TFQM), Café Dissensus, The Bangalore Review (TBR), the Out of Print Blog, Earthen Lamp Journal, Open Road Review, and Asian Cha among others.)

Night Song