5 - 7 December 2019 , Thu - Sat.
GALF 2019 : Speakers | Programme | Partners | Performances | Artwork | Videos
Photo Gallery: Inaugural Day | Day 1 | Day 2
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 & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006), Central Time (Penguin/ Viking, 2014), and, most recently, Jonahwhale (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton, 2018). His poetry has appeared in German translation as Die Ankunft der Vögel (Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006) and Feldnotizen des Magiers (Editions Offenes Feld, 2015). His translation of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011).
Hoskote 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 been researcher-in-residence at BAK/ basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. He has been honoured with the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award, the Sahitya Akademi Award for Translation, and the S H Raza Award for Literature. Hoskote is Poetry Editor for DOMUS India and Academic Consultant to the CSMVS Museum, Bombay.
Arjun Subramaniam
Air Vice Marshal Arjun Subramaniam is a retired fighter pilot from the IAF who has flown MiG-21s and Mirage-2000s. He is also a military historian, academic and strategic commentator with an interesting post-retirement career. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard and Oxford universities and Visiting Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is currently a Visiting Prof at Ashoka and Jindal Universities and has lectured extensively at war colleges in India and the US and at a wide range of Universities and think tanks in the US and UK including Harvard, MIT, Georgetown University, Oxford, Carnegie Endowment, RUSI and IISS. He is the author of ‘India’s Wars: A Military History 1947-1971 with the sequel being published next year. He writes extensively in the public domain on diverse strategic and national security issues.
Abhay Sardesai
Abhay Sardesai has been the Editor of ART India, the premier art magazine of India, since November 2002. He has been a Visiting Faculty in Aesthetics at the Department of English, University of Mumbai; and the Chair of Humanities, Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture, Mumbai. Abhay has also taught at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS); the Bhau Daji Lad Museum (BDLM); and Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey (SNDT) Women’s University. He writes in English and translates from Marathi, Konkani and Gujarati. Abhay has written widely on art and literature and read from his work at various places.
Saba Hasan
Saba Hasan is a noted contemporary artist with a diverse multimedia repertoire developed over twenty five years of highly distinguished practice. Saba has been nominated for the Celeste Contemporary Art Prize for her video La Verite/ Haqeeqat/ the Truth; she is the recipient of the French Government Cultural Fellowship, the Moscow Foto Award, the Raza National Award.
Her works have been exhibited at major international venues like the 55th International Venice Biennale, the Met Brauer Museum New York, the National Gallery of Art Colombo, The Assab One, Milan and the Hohenburg Castle Austria. Saba works in a plurality of media comprising photography, video art, book sculptures, paintings and sound installations spanning contemplative, conceptual ideas and a long engagement with organic materials. Her use of natural elements like the sun, sand, leaves, water, the Urdu script, and her voice make her work idiosyncratic, nuanced and powerful. In a subtle thoughtful tone she reminds us that human consciousness is capable of creating a reality which is not only beautiful but also filled with hope which is so integral to our fractured world.
Albertina Almeida
Albertina Almeida is a lawyer, human rights activist, independent researcher and rights sensitiser. She holds a doctorate in law and teaches ‘Gender, Human Rights and Law’ for the MA in Women’s Studies programme at Goa University. She is also a member of the Board of Studies, Department of Women’s Studies, Goa University. Albertina engages and addresses meetings, symposia and workshops on social justice and rights issues. Among others, she is a Focal Point of the Feminist Law Programme of the Asia-Pacific Forum on Women Law and Development. She writes regularly for local periodicals and occasionally for the national media. Her writings can be accessed on the website of The Alzulaij Collective. She is the author of Tug and Tear: Dealing with Child Sexual Abuse (2008). Albertina has co-founded several rights initiatives and groups interrogating ‘development’, including Bailancho Saad, Citizens’ Initiatives for Communal Harmony, Saad Aangan, and SEZ Watch. She is also a legal consultant to various organizations working on gender and child rights issues, migrant concerns, transgender rights, and human rights. She has also been a part of official and civil society committees for advocacy and drafting of laws for women and children.
Ashley D'Mello
Ashley D'Mello spent over 30 years in daily journalism, 25 of them with the Times of India. He has been a media fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge University (2003); and a visiting scholar at the School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley (2012-2014). In recent years, D’Mello has written primarily on city and community issues. He has been especially interested in writing on the urban transformations in Mumbai. He has also been a Times correspondent for Goa (1992-1994) and written at length on coalition politics and political instability, as also environmental problems thrown up by the construction of the Konkan Railway and tourism. He was the first to draw attention to the anti-Semitic tone of the feast of St Joao.
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.
Martin Macwan
Martin Macwan is a human rights activist based in Gujarat. He has devoted his life and has been working for eradication of untouchability and caste-based discrimination. He is the founder of Navsarjan Trust and many other institutions. He also writes books for children on the issues of equality and non-discrimination. He has been awarded with Robert Kennedy award for human rights; the Gleitsman activist award; and recognized by the Human Rights Watch and others for his work. Through Navsarjan Trust, Martin has been able to do pioneering work for the eradication of Manual scavenging.
Keshava Guha
Keshava Guha is a writer and editor. His novel Accidental Magic (HarperCollins, 2019) is set in Boston in the early 2000s, in a community of adult Harry Potter obsessives. He is the fiction editor at Juggernaut Books in New Delhi.
He was raised in Bangalore and educated at Harvard and at Goldsmiths, University of London. His literary and political journalism has appeared in The Hindu, Scroll.in, Wall Street Journal, Die Welt, Literary Review and Caravan, among other publications.
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.
