5 - 7 December 2019 , Thu - Sat.
GALF 2019 : Speakers | Programme | Partners | Performances | Artwork | Videos
Photo Gallery: Inaugural Day | Day 1 | Day 2
Akshay Singh
Akshay Singh received the Mohammed S Farsi Foundation Scholarship for Arts to pursue an MA in Screenwriting from the National Film & Television School, UK. Back in India he wrote and produced the feature films - ‘The Gold-Laden Sheep and The Sacred Mountain’ & ‘Mehsampur’. An enthusiast of stories on the fringes, Akshay was born in Varanasi and now calls Goa home.
Clara Astarloa
Clara Astarloa (Buenos Aires, 1980). Grade on History (Argentina), Master on Creative Writing (Spain) has worked and published in the areas of History and Literature in Latin America and Spain. She is currently Assistant professor at the Centre for Latin American Studies, Department of International Relations, Goa University. She has published the poetry book Mandalay (2017) in Spain which was awarded by PROSUR, Argentine Government (2019). She has also published short stories and poems in several anthologies such as Time of Short stories (Planeta Publishing, 2010), The Best Poems (Imagenta Publishing, 2014), Stories in 35mm (El Sendero Publishing, 2015), About Shakespeare (Samarcanda, 2017). She also won literary accesits such as the XXII Hispanic Literary Competition of the University of Seville (2016) and VII Young Talent Competition Planeta Publishing House (2010). She has also done literary, historical and documentary translations. She recently translated the poetry book A Poet in New York by Federico Garcia Lorca (Lantia Publishing, 2018). Poems of her book Winter Garden were made into musical-coral works by the Spanish composer Javier Busto.
Suneeta Peres da Costa
Suneeta Peres da Costa was born in Sydney, Australia, to parents of Goan origin. She writes fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry. Her debut novel, Homework, was published internationally by Bloomsbury in 1999 and a novella, Saudade (Giramondo, 2018; Transit Books USA & Canada, 2019) – on the legacies of Portuguese colonialism and the Goan diaspora in Angola – is shortlisted for the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2019 (Fiction). Over the years, she has worked with the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Museum of Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the University of Technology, Sydney, Sydney Review of Books & Mascara Literary Review, among others. Her literary honours include a Fulbright Scholarship, the Australia Council for the Arts BR Whiting Residency, Rome, and, recently, an Asialink Arts Creative Exchange to the Australian and New Zealand Studies Centre at Himachal Pradesh University, India. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Communication from the University of Technology, Sydney, and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, New York.
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.
Víctor Rodríguez Núñez
Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (Havana, 1955) is one of Cuba’s most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers, with over fifty collections of his poetry published throughout the world. He has been the recipient of major awards all over the Spanish-speaking region, including, in 2015, the coveted Loewe Prize. His selected poems have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Macedonian, Serbian, and Swedish. He has been a riveting presence at the most important international literary festivals, having read in more than forty countries. In the last decade, his work has developed an enthusiastic readership in the US and the UK, where he has published seven book-length translations. He divides his time between Gambier, Ohio, where he is currently Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba.
P. Sivakami
P. Sivakami is a prolific writer and a social activist. She has to her credit six acclaimed novels, more than hundred short stories, two poetry collections and several essays and articles.. Born in Tamil Nadu, India, she obtained a master’s degree in history. She served the Government of India and the State Government of Tamil Nadu for 28 years as a member of the Indian Administrative Service. She took voluntary retirement in 2008 to serve the poor and the disadvantaged. She is the founder of Dalit Land Right Movement, The Women’s Front, South India Dalit Writers and Artists Forum, Forum for Indian Women intellect and Founder President of Samuga Samatuva Padai ( Party for Social Equality ), a political party. She served the Sahitya Akademi ( Academy of Letters ) Government of India as its advisory member. She was awarded Fulbright fellowship to undertake research on the effective participation of women in the political process and governance in the USA between 2017 - 18.
Nirmala Govindarajan
Nirmala Govindarajan is an author, journalist and social sector documentarian. She endeavours to build an equitable world through her writing. Her new novel Taboo (Picador, Pan Macmillan, 2019) is inspired by under-aged girls who are kidnapped and trafficked. Her recent novel Hunger’s Daughters (Om Books International, 2019) is born out of her experience of documenting in India's rural heartland. Nirmala has authored The Community Catalyst, recommended reading for civil services aspirants (Sapna Book House, 2016), and co-authored Mind Blogs 1.0 (Write Wing Media, 2010). In 2014, Nirmala co-curated the debut Times Literary Carnival, Bangalore, and in 2016, debuted the Literary Lounge series at the British Council, Bangalore. Most recently, Nirmala has pioneered the Writer’s Yatra and Reader’s Yatra experiences in offbeat locations. Nirmala dabbles in theatre, plays the western classical piano and violin. www.nirmalagovindarajan.com
Amruta Patil
Writer-painter, Amruta Patil is India’s first female graphic novelist. She is the author of Kari and the Mahabharata-based Parva duology (Adi Parva & Sauptik). Her recent book is Aranyaka: Book of the Forest. She is a Nari Shakti Puraskar awardee.
Nupur Anand
Nupur Anand is a Mumbai-based journalist from Patna, Bihar. She completed her early education from Notre Dame Academy and St. Joseph’s Convent, Patna. Literature being her favourite subject in school, she actively participated and won several creative writing competitions. She studied English Honours at Miranda House, in Delhi University. Here, theatre struck a chord with her and she joined Anukriti the Hindi Dramatics Society as an actor and scriptwriter. During the three years in college, she and her team bagged over 60 awards. After post-graduation in Journalism from the Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media, Bengaluru, she worked at Bloomberg TV, where within six months, she became the key producer for the primetime news anchored by the channel's Editor-In-Chief. The shows produced by her were always amongst the top-rated shows of the channel. Eventually, she decided to shift gears and move to print journalism. She kicked off her career with The Economic Times, where she was a part of the team that launched India’s first personal finance newspaper, ET Wealth. Next, she joined DNA, where her stories regularly made front-page news, after which she moved to Business Standard in 2014. Currently, she is a writer with Quartz India. Mehboob Murderer is Nupur Anand’s debut work of fiction.
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.
