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Vivek Menezes
Vivek Menezes is a co-founder and Festival Curator of GALF alongside Damodar Mauzo. He is a widely published writer and photographer, and frequent contributor to leading periodicals in India and abroad, as
well as a weekly columnist for Times of India. His reviews and essays about literature and art are regularly featured in publications like Art India and Mint. VM was born in Bombay, went to high school in New York, and holds degrees from Wesleyan University and the London School of Economics. Previous career highlights include driving the safari train at the Bronx Zoo, cataloguing the private archives of Francis Newton Souza, serving as Capt. Jacques Cousteau's personal economic advisor, and building Sachin Tendulkar's first official website. VM lives adjacent to where the Mandovi river merges with the Arabian Sea near Miramar beach, along with his wife and three sons.
Sarah Farooqui
Sarah Farooqui is the Editor of Pragati – The Indian National Interest Review. She also runs Takshashila's flagship course, the Graduate Certificate in Public Policy (GCPP).
Sarah holds a degree in English Literature from St Stephen's College, Delhi and was a part of the pioneer cohort of Takshashila's Graduate Certificate in Public Policy course. She has previously worked at the Public Affairs Centre, Bangalore where she anchored multiple projects studying the design and implementation of child protection policies and laws across Karnataka for the Ministry of Women and Child Development and the IDRC. She has also worked with Smile Foundation, an NGO working on education, employability and accessable healthcare for young adults in cities across the country.
Her interests fluctuate from Turkish politics, public policy, international relations, literary and political theory, theatre, religion and cats. She has written opinion pieces in Pragati – The Indian National Interest Review and DNA online. She infrequently blogs at terranullius.nationalinterest.in
Ramachandra Guha
Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bangalore. 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.
Ângela Barreto Xavier
Ângela Barreto Xavier is an Historian of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. A PhD in History & Civilisation of European University Institute, Florence, lecturer at Universidade Nova de Lisboa and ISCTE-IUL, Maître de Conférences Invitée at EHESS, Paris, and Visiting Scholar at the History Department of Harvard University, she has also taught at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her research privileges the cultural and political history of early-modern Portuguese empire,as well as forms of social and cultural exclusion, about which she has published intensively. Her new book is co-authored with Ines G. Županov, Catholic Orientalism; Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge, 16th-18th centuries (OUP, New Delhi, 2015).
For more, see http://www.ics.ul.pt/instituto/?ln=p&pid=12&mm=5&ctmid=2&mnid=1&doc=31809901190
Naresh Fernandes
Naresh Fernandes is the editor of Scroll.in, a digital daily. He is the author of City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay and Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay's Jazz Age. He lives and works in Bombay. is the editor of Scroll.in, a digital daily. He is the author of City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay and Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay's Jazz Age. He lives and works in Bombay.
Yvonne Vaz Ezdani
I grew up in Burma, married and had two daughters there. We repatriated to Goa in the early 1980s and I now live in my paternal family home in Saligao, Goa. I was a teacher and now work as a school counsellor. I love reading, writing and travelling to visit and spend time with my daughters and their families. My first book 'Songs of the Survivors' was published in December 2007.
Savia Viegas
Savia Viegas is a writer, artist and academic living in Carmona, Goa. Her novels and exhibitions include "Museum thru Indian eyes" - a photographic exhibition at NCPA sponsored by USEFI held in March 2005. Her debut novel "Tales from the Attic" was published in March 2007. In December 2009 "Picturing Us" her solo exhibition of paintings was held. Her second novel, "Let me tell you about Quinta" was published by Penguin India in 2011. Her illustrated fiction work "Abha Nama" and "Eddi and Diddi" was published in November 2012. Her second solo show entitled 'Mementos' was exhibited at Sunaparanta in 2014.
Aditya Sudarshan
Aditya Sudarshan is the author of three novels, A Nice Quiet Holiday (Westland Books, 2009), Show Me A Hero (Rupa and Co., 2011) and most recently, The Persecution of Madhav Tripathi (Harper Collins India, 2015). His short stories have been published in various magazines and anthologies. He is also the author of a number of produced plays, including The Green Room, winner of the Hindu Metroplus Playwright Award for 2011. He writes literary criticism for The Hindu Literary Review and other publications, and political satire for NDTV's The Great Indian Tamasha.
Dilip Borkar
Dilip Borkar is an Indian writer, who writes in his mother tongue Konkani and also other languages such as Marathi, Hindi and English. He is well known in literature, journalism, docu-film production and socio-political activities. He is popular for his satirical writing, and has 2 novels, 1 poetry collection, 7 books of children’s literature, 2 one act play collection, 5 dramas, 3 travelogues, 5 literary essay collection, 3 translation in his credit. He has produced documentary films on various personalities and subjects for the Govt. of Goa and corporate houses. As a columnist he has contributed several articles in various newspapers and periodicals. He is the Chief Editor of popular family Konkani monthly magazine ‘Bimb’. Besides Sahitya Akademi Award for his travelogue, he has several National and state Awards in his credit, including three National Awards for All India Radio, Play wright competition, Dr. T. M. A. Pai Foundation Award, New Goan overseas Award, ‘Rajya Sanman’, Goa State Cultural Award etc. for his creative work.
R. Benedito Ferrão
R. Benedito Ferrão is a writer and current Mellon Faculty Fellow in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the College of William and Mary, Virginia. His research centres on literary representations of Goans in transnational contexts. A writer of fiction, creative non-fiction, op-eds, and literary criticism, Ferrão’s work has been published internationally. Find his writing at thenightchild.blogspot.com, or on Facebook at The Nightchild Nexus.
The International Centre Goa, Goa Writers Group and Goa 1556 co-organised the Book Release of "From Mind to Keyboard" A collection of essays by writers of their journey(s) edited by Sheela Jaywant on 9th July 2016. This was the first Curtain Raiser Programme for VIIth Edition of Goa Arts & Literature Festival 2016.
