5 - 7 December 2019 , Thu - Sat.
Niraja Gopal Jayal
Niraja Gopal Jayal is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her most recent publication (edited) is Re-Forming India: The Nation Today. (Penguin Random House, 2019) Her book Citizenship and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press, 2013) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in 2015. She is also the author of Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and the Governance of Public Institutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Democracy and the State: Welfare, Secularism and Development in Contemporary India (OUP, 1999). She has co-edited The Oxford Companion to Politics in India, and is the editor/co-editor of, among others, Democracy in India (OUP, 2001) and Local Governance in India: Decentralisation and Beyond (OUP 2005). She has held visiting appointments at, among others, King’s College, London; the EHESS, Paris; Princeton University; and the University of Melbourne. In 2009, she delivered the Radhakrishnan Memorial Lectures at All Souls College, Oxford. She was Vice-President of the American Political Science Association in 2011-12.
Keki N. Daruwalla
Keki N. Daruwalla writes poetry and fiction and lives in Delhi. His last poetry volume is Naishapur and Babylon (2018 Speaking Tiger), which includes work  between 2006-2017. His last novel is "Swerving to Solitude" (2018 , Simon and Schuster). His last award was Poet laureateship of the Literature Live Festival in Bombay, 2017.
Samhita Arni
When she was eight, Samhita Arni started writing and illustrating her first book. The Mahabharata - A Child's View went on to be published in seven language editions and sell 50,000 copies worldwide. Samhita's second book, Sita's Ramayana, a graphic novel developed in collaboration with Patua artist Moyna Chitrakar, was on the New York Times Bestseller list for Graphic Novels. Her third book, The Missing Queen, has been published by Penguin (Viking) and Zubaan. Samhita's fourth book, The Prince, has been published by Juggernaut.
Gabriel Rosenstock
Born c. 1949, Kilfinane, Co. Limerick, in postcolonial Ireland. Poet, tankaist, haikuist, novelist, essayist, playwright, author/translator of over 180 books, mostly in Irish (Gaelic). Member Aosdána (Irish academy of arts & letters). Former Chairman Poetry Ireland. Prolific translator into Irish of international poetry (among others Ko Un, Seamus Heaney, K. Satchidanandan, Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammad Iqbal, Hilde Domin, Peter Huchel etc.); plays (Beckett, Frisch, Yeats); songs (Bob Dylan, Kate Bush, The Pogues, Leonard Cohen, Bob Marley, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Nick Drake etc. He initiated the anthology Goa: A Garland of Poems, ed. Rochelle Potkar (The Onslaught Press). Rosenstock’s creative, collaborative work with visual artists and photographers has featured on many platforms, such as The Culturium: https://www.theculturium.com/author/gabriel-rosenstock/ His latest book is Walk with Gandhi, illustrated by Masood Hussain.
Rakhshanda Jalil
Dr Rakhshanda Jalil is a translator, writer, and literary historian. She has published over 25 books and written over 50 academic papers and essays. Her book on the lesser-known monuments of Delhi, Invisible City, continues to be a bestseller. Her recent works include: Liking Progress, Loving Change: A Literary History of the Progressive Writers Movement in Urdu (OUP, 2014); a biography of Urdu feminist writer Dr Rashid Jahan A Rebel and her Cause (Women Unlimited, 2014); a translation of The Sea Lies Ahead, Intizar Husain's seminal novel on Karachi (Harper Collins, 2015) and Krishan Chandar's partition novel Ghaddar (Westland, 2017); an edited volume of critical writings on Ismat called An Uncivil Woman (Oxford University Press, 2017); and in the past year a literary biography of the Urdu poet Shahryar for Harper Collins; The Great War: Indian Writings on the First World War (Bloomsbury); Preeto & Other Stories: The Male Gaze in Urdu (Niyogi) and Kaifiyat, a translation of Kaifi Azmi’s poems for Penguin Random House and Jallianwala Bagh: Literary Responses in Prose &Poetry (Niyogi Books). Her latest book is But You Don’t Look Like a Muslim (Harper Collins), a collection of 40 essays on religion, culture, literature and identity. She runs an organization called Hindustani Awaaz, devoted to the popularization of Hindi-Urdu literature and culture. Her debut collection of fiction, Release & Other Stories, was published by Harper Collins in 2011, and received critical acclaim. She was awarded the Kaifi Azmi Award for her contribution to Urdu and the First Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu-Hindi Translation. She writes regularly for major newspapers such as Hindustan Times, Indian Express, The Hindu as well as magazines such as Outlook, Scroll, The Wire, etc. She is the Editor of the Taj magazine, a bi-annual book-length journal of the Taj group of hotels.
Samar Halarnkar
Samar Halarnkar is a columnist and author of Nirvana Under the Rain Tree (2002), an early chronicle of India’s internet revolution and A Married Man’s Guide to Creative Cooking: And Other Dubious Adventures (2013). He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley and a fellow at the Nieman Foundation, Harvard University. A journalist for 30 years, he has been the Editor of IndiaSpend.org, a nonprofit focussed on data-driven, public-interest journalism and Managing Editor of the Hindustan Times. An enthusiastic cook, his culinary experiences find their way into a cooking column for Mint Lounge.
Dhruv Bogra
Dhruv Bogra is the author of the adventure travel, non fiction book, ‘Grit, Gravel and Gear – Four Hundred days on a bicycle from the Arctic to the Andes’.
In 2016, Dhruv undertook a 14 month long transcontinental bicycle odyssey fraught with adventure, exploration and peril when he chose to plunge into the far end of the planet to fulfill a childhood dream of exploring the lands and indigenous culture of the Arctic, the Maya, Zapotec and Aztec in Mexico and Central America and the Inca in Peru. As he cycled alone for 15,000 kilometers across ten countries from the cold and barren wilderness of the unforgiving arctic tundra to the thin air of the Andes at 4500 metres he endured hardship, misery, catharsis, happiness, and unbridled joy.
He continues to be an adventure and endurance cyclist who has cycled extensively in the Indian Himalayas in Ladakh, Himachal, Uttarkhand, and Sikkim and the Western Ghats on his mountain bike.
Maaz bin Bilal
Maaz bin Bilal is a poet, translator, and academic. His first collection, Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu, was published in 2019 by Yoda Press. He has translated Fikr Taunsvi’s journal of partition, The Sixth River, from Urdu into English (Speaking Tiger, 2019). Maaz received the Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship in writing and translation for Wales,  2018-19. He is an associate professor of literary studies at the liberal arts school of Jindal Global University, and holds a PhD from Queen’s University Belfast for his thesis on the politics of friendship in E. M. Forster’s work, which he is reworking into a monograph. Maaz also enjoys football.
Tilak Devasher
Tilak Devasher is the author of three books on Pakistan: ‘Pakistan: Courting the Abyss’ (December 2016) that was termed ‘easily the best book on Pakistan’ by a noted Pakistani commentator – Khaled Ahmed; ‘Pakistan: At the Helm’ (July 2018). A Pakistani reviewer in Dawn termed it as ‘a book that any future leader of Pakistan ought to have by their bedside, simply because it is the sum of all that has gone before.’ The third book ‘Pakistan: The Balochistan Conundrum’ was published in July 2019.
Tilak retired as Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India in October 2014. He is currently a member of the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) and also a Consultant with the Vivekananda International Foundation.
During his professional career Tilak served in J&K, Delhi and abroad. He specialized in security issues, especially pertaining to India’s neighbourhood. Post retirement, he has continued to take a keen interest in such issues with special focus on Pakistan.
Tilak has taken to writing after his superannuation. Apart from his books, he has written articles for a host of newspapers, magazines and think tank journals. He also appears regularly on TV talk shows.
Tilak is an alumnus of Mayo College, Ajmer and St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.
Derek Mascarenhas
Derek Mascarenhas is the author of the acclaimed debut linked short story collection, Coconut Dreams (Book*hug, 2019). A graduate of the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies Creative Writing Program, Derek is a finalist and runner up for the Penguin Random House of Canada Student Award for Fiction, and a nominee for the Marina Nemat Award. He has works published in places such as The Dalhousie Review, Switchback, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Joyland, and The Antigonish Review. Derek is one of four children born to parents who emigrated from Goa, India, and settled in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. A backpacker who has traveled across six continents, Derek currently resides in Toronto.
