7 - 10 December 2017 , Thu - Sun.
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Swaminathan Kalidas
Swaminathan Kalidas has been a long-time commentator and participant on the Indian arts scene. He has worked as a journalist with leading national newspapers and magazines including Times of India and India Today. He has also taught aspects of Indian aesthetics and classical Hindustani music at universities and worked for the archives of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, Delhi, and the Bharat Bhawan, Bhopal. Kalidas has twice been a Fellow, Department of Culture, Government of India. He scripted and directed Hai Akhtari a documentary on the legendary singer Begum Akhtar, and was advisor for Rasa Yatra a film on the life of Pt Mallikarjun Mansur. His publications include Zarina Hashmi: Radiant Transits; Of Capacities and Containment: Poetry and Politics in the Art of Subodh Gupta; Begum Akhtar: Love’s Own Voice; and Pandit Mallikarjun Mansur Centenary Catalogue.
Margaret Mascarenhas
Margaret Mascarenhas is a transnational novelist, poet, essayist, and independent curator. She is the author of Skin (2001), set in Goa and Angola; The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (2009), a novel set in Venezuela, where she grew up; and Triage (2013), a collection of poetry, sketches and flash fiction. She has contributed to numerous literary journals and anthologies, the most recent being Walking Toward Ourselves (2016). Mascarenhas was the Founding Director of the Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts (2008-2011). She is presently working on her third novel, a collection of short stories, and recently completed a second collection of poetry titled Kintsugi: This is How You Fix What is Broken. Mascarenhas is an author-member of PEN USA, PEN Delhi and a Goa delegate for PEN South India. She is a recipient of the Luso-American FLAD award.
Manohar Shetty
Manohar Shetty is a Goa-based poet and widely considered one of the most prominent among those writing in English. His new collection of poems Full Disclosure: New and Collected Poems (1981-2017) was published recently. In addition to several poetry volumes such as Morning Light (2016); Personal Effects (2015); Living Room: Poems (2014); and Creatures Great and Small (2014); Shetty has edited Ferry Crossing: Short Stories from Goa (1998) and Goa Travels: Being the Accounts of Travellers from the 16th to the 21st Century (2014). His poems have been translated into Finnish, German, Italian, Marathi, and Slovenian. Shetty has been a Homi Bhabha Fellow and Senior Sahitya Akademi Fellow.
Tanvi Bambolkar
Tanvi Bambolkar is a Research Scholar at the Department of English, Goa University, working on Folk Theatre of Goa. She has worked as a casual newsreader and translator at All India Radio, Panaji, and is currently Creative Writing Instructor at Bal Bhavan Panaji. She has been writing since childhood for local dailies, from creating puzzles for children to writing columns for the youth. Bambolkar is deeply attached to her mother tongue Konkani and has been active in all the activities related to the Konkani movement. Her translations from other languages into Konkani have been published in print and digital form on platforms like Prathambooks Storyweaver.
Udaya Narayana Singh
Udaya Narayana Singh is Chair-Professor and Head, Centre for Linguistic Studies, Amity University. He was earlier Director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore. Singh is a renowned linguist, poet, playwright, and essayist. He has published four collections of poems; twelve plays in Maithili (using the pen-name ‘Nachiketa’); six books of literary essays; a short story collection; and four volumes of poetry in Bengali, besides translating several books from and into many languages. He was a poet-invitee at the Frankfurt Book Fair – India Guest of Honour presentation (2006), and the Leader of the Cultural Delegation of Writers to China (2007). Singh has been the recipient of, among others, the Kalaignar Porkizhi Award, BAPASI, Chennai (2014); Jyotirishwar Sanman (2016); and Sir Ganganath Jha Sanman (2016).
William Wolak
William Wolak is a poet, photographer, and collage artist. He lives in New Jersey and teaches Creative Writing at William Paterson University. He has just published his fifteenth book of poetry entitled The Nakedness Defense (2017). In 2016, he was a featured poet at The Mihai Eminescu International Poetry Festival in Craiova, Romania; Europa in Versi, Lake Como, Italy; The Pesaro International Poetry Festival, Pesaro, Italy, The Xichang-Qionghai Silk Road International Poetry Week, Xichang, China; and Ethnofest, Pristina, Kosovo. His collages have been published in The Annual, Peculiar Mormyrid, Danse Macabre, Dirty Chai, Lost Coast Review, Yellow Chair Review, Otis Nebula, and Horror Sleaze Trash, and more recently in Naked in New Hope 2016, and The 2017 Seattle Erotic Art Festival.
Brian Mendonca
Brian Mendonca has self-published two volumes of verse, A Peace of India: Poems in Transit (2010) and Last Bus to Vasco: Poems from Goa (2006). After a decade in Delhi in school publishing he returned to his roots in Goa. He writes a weekly column, ‘On my mind' in Weekender section of Gomantak Times every Sunday. Mendonca currently teaches language and literature in Carmel College, Nuvem (Goa). He lives in Porvorim with his wife and son.
Antara Dev Sen
Antara Dev Sen is the founder editor of The Little Magazine, an independent journal of ideas and letters, and the first Indian magazine to focus on contemporary South Asian literature and offer it in English translation. Sen is also a literary critic and translator, a newspaper columnist and commentator on the media, politics and culture. She has edited several books including the TLM Short Stories from South Asia series. Earlier, Sen was Senior Editor of the Hindustan Times and the Indian Express in Delhi. She has also been a Reuters Fellow at Oxford University. Sen is associated with other media, literary, educational, and voluntary organisations in India and overseas. She lives in Delhi.
Ramachandra Guha
Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bengaluru. He has taught at the universities of Yale and Stanford, held the Arné Naess Chair at the University of Oslo, and been the Indo-American Community Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In the academic year 2011-2 he served as the Philippe Roman Professor of History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics.
Guha’s books include a pioneering environmental history, The Unquiet Woods (University of California Press, 1989), and an award-winning social history of cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field (Picador, 2002). India after Gandhi (Macmillan/Ecco Press, 2007) was chosen as a book of the year by the Economist, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out, and Outlook, and as a book of the decade in the Times of India, the Times of London, and The Hindu. His most recent book is Gandhi Before India (Knopf, 2014), which was chosen as a notable book of the year by the New York Times.
Apart from his books, Guha also writes a syndicated column, that appears in six languages in newspapers with a combined readership of some twenty mllion. Guha’s books and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages. The New York Times has referred to him as ‘perhaps the best among India’s non fiction writers’; Time Magazine has called him ‘Indian democracy’s pre-eminent chronicler’.
Ramachandra Guha’s awards include the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History, the Daily Telegraph/Cricket Society prize, the Malcolm Adideshiah Award for excellence in social science research, the Ramnath Goenka Prize for excellence in journalism, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the R. K. Narayan Prize. In 2009, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the Republic of India’s third highest civilian honour. In 2008, and again in 2013, Prospect magazine nominated Guha as one of the world’s most influential intellectuals. In 2014, he was awarded a honorary doctorate in the humanities by Yale University. In 2015, he was awarded the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to Asian studies.
Gabriel Rosenstock
Gabriel Rosenstock is a poet, tankaist, haikuist, novelist, playwright, short story writer and essayist, and author-translator of over 180 books, including works for children. Gaelic, the oldest literary language in Europe after Latin and Greek, is his language of choice. He has translated many writers from the Indian subcontinent in Gaelic including K. Satchidanandan, Dileep Jhaveri, Munir Niazi, Hemant Divate, Rati Saxena, Udayan Thakker, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Tagore, Iqbal, as well as haikuists K. Ramesh, Kala Ramesh and Janak Sapkota. A selection of his poems translated from the Gaelic I Open My Poem was published by Poetrywala, Mumbai. Gabriel is on the Advisory Board of PoetryIndia.com and a member of Aos Dána, The Irish Academy of Arts and Letters.
