5 - 7 December 2019 , Thu - Sat.
GALF 2019 : Speakers | Programme | Partners | Performances | Artwork | Videos
Photo Gallery: Inaugural Day | Day 1 | Day 2
Vidya Kamat
Vidya Kamat is an artist, research scholar, and academic. Her art practice looks at the mythological narratives and traditional belief systems engage and alter perceptions within contemporary Indian social reality. Kamat's works have been showcased in Dhaka( 2012), Istanbul(2007), Santa Fe( 2008), New Delhi(2010,2011) art fairs . She has also shown her works in curated shows in New York ( 2011), Singapore (2011), Thailand(2009), London( 2009), Paris( 2009) & recently Serendipity Festival Goa (2018). Besides, she has had solo shows in Mumbai and Bengaluru, India. Vidya Kamat is also a founder and curator of Talking Myths Project an online archive of traditional tales; and founder of a non-profit organisation Centre for Study of Mythology and Culture based in Goa India.
Anungla Zoe Longkumer
Anungla Zoe Longkumer can best be described as a free individual discovering her way through creative pursuits in music, writing, filmmaking, and folk traditions.
Having travelled widely and lived outside Nagaland for most of her life, she is currently based in Dimapur, Nagaland, where she freelances doing some content editing, music, and filmmaking. She is the author of Folklore of Eastern Nagaland (2017) which contains translations of folktales, folk songs and real life accounts, collected from the six tribes who inhabit the more remote parts of Eastern Nagaland.
She has also recently made a short documentary film ‘Shot Awake - The Making of Changlangshu’s New Logdrum’ which was released on 2nd May 2019 in Kohima, Nagaland, and screened at the Bali Indigenous Film Festival in May, 2019, and at the Rainforest Fringe Festival in Sarawak, Malaysia, in July 2019.
Samrat Choudhury a.k.a. Samrat X
Samrat Choudhury is an author and journalist, and a former editor of daily newspapers in India’s major metropolises, Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. His first novel, The Urban Jungle, was published by Penguin Books in 2011. Some of his literary essays and short stories have appeared in translation in German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. His latest publication is an edited anthology titled Insider/Outsider, on this issue with relation to Northeast India, of which he is one of the two editors. He has recently relaunched East Wind, an independent quarterly for Northeast India, in collaboration with its founder.
Samrat was the Asian Leadership Fellow from India at the International House of Japan in Tokyo in 2018 and a Chevening Scholar at the University of Westminster, London, in 2019.
Sunanda Mehta
Sunanda Mehta is a journalist with over twenty-five years of experience. She began her career at Femina and moved on to Magna Publishing, where she became the founder-editor of the Pune city magazine Citadel at the age of twenty-five. After this, she worked for the Indian Express for two decades, breaking many stories throughout her tenure. From 2010 to 2017, she was Resident Editor of the newspaper’s Pune edition, which made her the first woman editor of a national English daily in Pune.
A graduate of Lady Shri Ram College for Women where she studied History, Sunanda also has degrees in Education and Journalism. A former Chevening fellow, she has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Pune. Sunanda divides her time between Mumbai and Pune.
Augusto Pinto
Augusto Pinto is an Associate Professor of English at Dempo College in Goa. He is a book reviewer, essayist and translator from Konkani into English. He has translated several important Konkani writers over the last 30 years, most recently the short stories of Jayanti Naik in The Salt of the Earth (2017) and the poets Ramesh Veluskar, Soter Barreto and Vishnu Wagh in Goa: A Garland of Poems (2017). He is currently working on a book of plays on the eminent Goan dramatist Pundalik Naik. He is also a member of the Organising Committee of the Ambedkar Memorial Lecture Series that are conducted during GALF.
Namit Arora
Namit Arora is a writer, humanist, travel photographer, and former internet technologist. He grew up in Gwalior, studied at IIT Kharagpur, worked in Silicon Valley for two decades, took courses of dubious practical value at Stanford, and visited scores of countries before moving to Delhi NCR with his partner in 2013. He writes essays, reviews, criticism, travelogues, fiction, memoir, and history, often merging many forms at once, and tackling subjects as diverse as identity politics, artificial intelligence, Indian-Americans, eating animals, and cryptocurrencies. He is the author of The Lottery of Birth (2017), A California Story (US) / Love and Loathing in Silicon Valley (India) (2019), and an upcoming book on travel and history (2020). His home on the web is shunya.net.
Prava Rai
Prava Rai has lived in Goa since 1994 with her family. They found a piece of heaven tucked away in a corner of Chorao Island where they built their home and moved their in 1998.
Prava studied in Mt Hermon School Darjeeling and joined Lady Shri Ram College to study English Honours then spent five years at Jawaharlal Nehru University completing Masters in English Language and Literature from the School of Languages and an M.Phil from the Centre for American Studies, School of International Studies.
Prava edited “The Book Review” for four years, taught for two years at the Institute of Mass Communication in Delhi and worked in the PRADAN , an organization devoted to rural development.
In Goa, she edited the Goa Heritage Action Groups’ journal “PARMAL” for six years and is a member Goa Writers Group. In 2015 she edited a special issue on Sikkim’s culture and art for MARG Publications, Mumbai and has researched and written two volumes of coffee table books “The Land and the People” for the Department of Culture, Government of Sikkim.
Her latest project has been to build the Reading Room, a library in the village of Dumigaon, in South Sikkim. Now she divides her time between Goa and Sikkim.
Mukul Kumar
Mukul Kumar is a bureaucrat and and an author as well. He belongs to the 1997 batch of the Civil Services. An Indian Railway Traffic Service officer, he is at present working in New Delhi. He has studied Humanities from Delhi University, graduating from Kirori Mal College. He has also studied Public Administration at the prestigious Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi, which got him Master of Philosophy in Social Sciences.
He has been honoured with the National award for outstanding service to the Indian Railways .
His works as an author include two novels, ‘As Boys Become Men’ published in 2016, and ‘Seduction by Truth’ in 2018.
Mukul began his literary journey with the publication of an anthology of English poems ‘The Irrepressible Echoes’ in 2012.
Tweet the author at @writermukul, mail him at mail him at mukulkumar1703@gmail.com, message him at https://www.facebook.com/ writermukulkumar/ and visit http://www.authormukul.com.
Pantaleão Fernandes
Pantaleão Fernandes is a Goa-based writer, photographer and ethnographer. Very passionate about Goa and her vibrant culture, he spends most of his time exploring villages in the deep hinterlands, to experience firsthand the warm spirit and culture of the villagers and document these experiences.
These excursions brought about his earlier books, “100 Goan Experiences”, “Goa Remembered” and the ethnographic book, “Traditional Occupations of Goa” which is a rich documentation of the ancient crafts of Goa’. His latest book is entitled, “ Goa – Rare Portraits” - is a pictorial depiction of the tribal life of Goa. He has authored a few children’s books including “Once Upon a Time in Goa” and a bilingual book, “Ful – A Story”.
Heta Pandit
Heta Pandit worked with Dr Jane Goodall on chimpanzee research in Tanzania, East Africa. In 1983, volunteered with an NGO in Bombay advocating heritage conservation. She came to Goa in 1995 and continued writing on heritage.
A founder member the Goa Heritage Action Group, she has written 9 books: - Houses of Goa, Hidden Hands, Dust & Other Short Stories from Goa, Walking in Goa, Walking in Old Goa, Walking with Angels, There’s More to Life Than a House in Goa and Grinding Stories-Songs from Goa.
Heta is fluent in Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, and English. She also translates Goan literature from the Marathi language into English to enable this genre to reach a wider audience.
