6 - 8 December 2018 , Thu - Sat.
GALF 2018 : Speakers
Supriya Nair
Supriya Nair is a Mumbai-based journalist and studied at St Xavier's College. She is a sports columnist for Mumbai Mirror and former associate editor at The Caravan magazine and staff writer at Mint Lounge, Mumbai. In 2016, she edited the anthology The Caravan Book of Profiles, a collection of award-winning political and cultural reportage from the magazine. Nair writes about books, sports and culture and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, Vogue and Wisden.
Annie Zaidi
Annie Zaidi writes across genre and her body of work includes reportage, essays, fiction, drama, film and graphic storytelling. She is the author of Gulab (2014) Love Stories # 1 to 14 (2012) and Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales (2010), and the co-author of The Good Indian Girl (2011). She has also edited Unbound: 2000 Years of Indian Women's Writing (2016) and Equal Halves (2017). Annie is the winner of The Hindu Playwright Award 2018, for Untitled 1. Her script for a radio play, Jam, was the regional (South Asia) winner for the BBC’s International Playwriting Competition 2011. Annie works as a filmmaker too. Her first documentary film, In her Words: The Journey of Indian Women, traces the lives and struggles of women as reflected in their literature. She has written and directed five fictional short films.
Elizabeth Flock
Elizabeth Flock is an American journalist, author and documentary filmmaker whose work has focused on women’s and social issues. Her first book Love and Marriage in Mumbai (2018) is a New York Times' Editor's pick, and has been called a “vivid portrait of a nation in transition" (Publisher's Weekly, starred review), "deeply sympathetic but unsentimental" (NPR) and "impossible to put down" (The Washington Post). A reviewer in the Indian Express wrote that the book, which follows three couples in Mumbai over the course of a decade, “raises the right questions not just about the institution, but also of the successes and failures of the great Indian family.” Elizabeth began her career at Forbes India Magazine in Mumbai, where she did features and investigative reports. Her work has since appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, The Atlantic, The Hindu, Hindustan Times and many other publications. She has been nominated for two Emmy awards and was a finalist for the Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award. Elizabeth’s most recent work includes an investigation of sexual harassment, assault and retaliation with the U.S. Forest Service at NewsHour. That report led to the resignation of the Forest Service Chief and widespread change within the agency.
Shanta Gokhale
Shanta Gokhale is a bilingual columnist, novelist, playwright, film script-writer and translator. She has translated Uddhav Shelke's novel Dhag; her own novels Rita Welinkar(1995) and Tya Varshi (2010) - as Crowfall (2013) - both of which received Maharashtra State awards for best fiction; Durga Khote's autobiography I, Durga Khote (2007) and over a dozen plays from Marathi into English, including her own, Avinash (1994). Her translation of Gieve Patel's English play Mister Behram into Marathi was staged in Pune and Mumbai. Her other translations include Prabhakar Barve's Kora Canvas and Makarand Sathe's novel Achyut Athavale ani Athavan into English and Jerry Pinto's Em and the Big Hoom into Marathi for which she received the Balshastri Jambhekar award in 2016. Shanta has written numerous film-scripts for documentary and feature films. She has been a culture columnist for The Times of India, Mid-Day and Mumbai Mirror. She is the author of Playwright at the Centre: Marathi Drama from 1843 to the Present (2000) and has edited Satyadev Dubey: A Fifty-year Journey Through Theatre (2011), The Theatre of Veenapani Chawla: Theory, Practice, Performance and The Scenes We Made: Experimental Theatre in Mumbai (2015). Shanta received the Sangeet Natak Akademi award for overall contribution to the Performing Arts in 2016.
Keerti Ramachandra
Keerti Ramachandra is by aptitude, inclination and training, a teacher, a translator by virtue of being multilingual and an editor by default. She has taught English language and literature at all levels and conducted translation workshops for college students and aspiring translators. Keerti translates from Marathi, Kannada and Hindi into English. Her translation of the Sahitya Akademi award winning novel, A Dirge for the Dammed was short listed for the Crossword award in 2016. Her translations won her the A. K. Ramanujam award instituted by KATHA for translation from two or more languages. She co-translated Hindutva or Hind Swaraj by U. R. Anathamurty from Kannada; and Joginder Paul’s stories from Urdu/ Hindi A Dying Sun and Other Stories. Another translated collection, of Gangadhar Gadgil’s Marathi stories A Faceless Evening and Other Stories, was published in 2017. Her translations from Marathi, Kannada and Hindi have appeared in anthologies, magazines and journals in India and abroad. Keerti is also a freelance editor of fiction and nonfiction for leading publishing houses. She is currently teaching a post-graduate course in Translation Theory and Practice at Mount Carmel College, Bangalore, where she lives.
Deborah Baker
Deborah Baker’s first full-length book, a biography of the American modernist poet Laura Riding (In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, 1992) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2008 she published A Blue Hand, an account of Allen Ginsberg’s travels in India that also traced the idea of India in the American imagination. While a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, she researched and wrote The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in Non-fiction. Her current book, The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire, for which she received support from the Guggenheim and Whiting Foundations was just published by Penguin Random House India. She lives in Aldona, Goa and Brooklyn, New York.
Photo: Julienne Schaer
Rana Safvi
Rana Safvi is a renowned author and translator. She is the author of Tales from the Quran and Hadith and Where Stones Speak: Historical Trails in Mehrauli, The First City of Delhi and The Forgotten Cities of Delhi. She has also translated both the editions of Asar us Sanadeed, the seminal work on Delhi’s monuments, written by Sir Syed Ahmad. Rana also runs the popular blog ‘Hazrat-e-Dilli’ on her site ranasafvi.com, and is passionate about documenting India’s syncretic culture through her writings. Rana is a postgraduate in History from Aligarh Muslim University and lives in Delhi with her family.
Ranjit Hoskote
Ranjit Hoskote is a leading Anglophone Indian poet, and has also been acclaimed as a seminal contributor to Indian art criticism. His books include Vanishing Acts: New and Selected Poems 1985-2005 (2006), Central Time (2014), and, most recently, Jonahwhale (2018). His poetry has appeared in German translation as Die Ankunft der Vögel (2006) and Feldnotizen des Magiers (2015). His translation of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (2011). Ranjit curated India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011); co-curated the 7th Gwangju Biennale, and served on the jury of the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). He was a Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa; and has been writer-in-residence at Villa Waldberta, Munich; Theater der Welt, Essen-Mülheim; and the Polish Institute, Berlin. He has also been researcher-in-residence at BAK/ basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. Ranjit has received the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award; the Sahitya Akademi Award for Translation; and the S. H. Raza Award for Literature. He was juror for international literature for the 2015-2017 fellowship cycle at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. He is Poetry Editor for DOMUS India.
Vinutha Mallya
Vinutha Mallya is a journalist with more than 15 years' experience in publishing as a book editor. With a keen interest in the business of publishing in India, she has written and spoken about the subject on many forums in the past. She is currently Assistant Features Editor at Pune Mirror, Times of India Group.
Ashwani Kumar
Ashwani Kumar is an Anglophone Indian poet, writer, and professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). His anthologies include My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter (2014) with a prolegomenon by Ashis Nandy and Banaras and the Other (2017). Ashwani’s poems - translated in Indian languages and Hungarian - are noted for their ‘lyrical celebration’ of garbled voices of memory and their subversive ‘whimsy’ quality. Banaras, the first of a trilogy on religious cities, was long-listed for the 1st Jayadev National Poetry Award 2017. Select cantos of the Hungarian translation of Banaras were performed by Hungarian band Kalaka at the Times Lit Fest 2017 in Mumbai. He is currently working on Ayodhya, the second volume in the trilogy; the non-fiction book Biharis (forthcoming, Aleph Books); and a special volume on Tagore in Hungarian Architecture of Alphabets/Betűrendek architektúrája (forthcoming, 2019). Ashwani is the co-founder of Indian Novels Collective which brings classic novels of in Indian Literature to English readers. He is the author of Community Warriors (2008); and co-editor of Power Shifts and Global Governance (2010), Global Civil Society Yearbook 2009: Poverty and Activism (2009). Migration and Mobility (forthcoming). He also writes articles and reviews for Financial Express, the Print, Business Standard, The Hindu, Indian Express, DNA, Open Democracy and others.
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