6 - 8 December 2018 , Thu - Sat.
GALF 2018 : Speakers | Programme | Partners | Performances | Workshops | Exhibitions | Artwork | Press Release | Videos
Photo Gallery: Inaugural Day | Day 1 | Day 2
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.
Manjushree Thapa
Manjushree Thapa is the author of ten books of fiction, non-fiction, and literary translation. Her latest novel is All of Us in Our Own Lives (2016) set in the cynical, moneyed world of international aid in Nepal. Since her first book Mustang Bhot in Fragments (1992), she has written among others, The Tutor of History (2001), Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy of Democracy (2005); Tilled Earth: Stories (2007); and The Lives We Have Lost: Essays and Opinions on Nepal (2012), She has recently translated Indra Bahadur Rai’s classic Darjeeling novel, There’s a Carnival Today (2017), into English. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the London Review of Books, Newsweek, and the Globe and Mail. She was born in Kathmandu and lives in Toronto.
Isabel Santa Rita Vas
Isabel Santa Rita Vas is Guest Faculty, Department of English, Goa University. She is a founder member of The Mustard Seed Art Company, an amateur theatre group from Goa and an author and director. Rita Vas is the author of a collection of plays, Frescoes in the Womb: Six Plays from Goa (2012). All the plays in the collection have their centre in Goa, but often radiate out of their birthplace into a larger world, as do the destinies of numerous people from Goa who figure in it.
Chinmay Tumbe
Chinmay Tumbe is faculty member at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and the 2018 Alfred D. Chandler Jr International Visiting Scholar in Business History at Harvard Business School. He works on migration, cities, firms and history. An alumnus of the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, he has been a faculty member at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad and was the 2013 Jean Monnet Fellow at the Migration Policy Centre, European University Institute, Florence, Italy. He has published widely on migration for a decade and has served on policymaking groups. India Moving is his first book.
Chador Wangmo
Chador Wangmo is the celebrated author of Dema, the first superhero character in Bhutan. She has written ten illustrated books for children,  including The Flea and The Louse; Abhi, Memey and The Mosquito; Abhi, Memey and The Monkey, and The Three Friends; two novels for adults; and two chapter books for intermediate level. Although Chador’s work is mostly prose, she likes writing poems which have been well received in literary festivals conducted by FOSWAL at Delhi and Jaipur in India. Her poems have been translated into Nepali and published in various papers in Nepal. She has been awarded an honorary Doctorate in Literature by the Vikram Sheela Vidyapeeth, Sidharth Nagar, UP. She has also been awarded Sidhartha Tathagat Sansthan Sahitya award in recognition of her love for literature.
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:Â Julienne Schaer
Avishek Sen
Avishek Sen is a contemporary artist working primarily with watercolour as a medium. Juxtaposing intricate and large forms, conflating fruits, animals, humans and inanimate objects, often in a metaphorical construct, Avishek explores questions about contemporary socio-political issues in India. He received his Master’s degree in Fine Art (Painting) from Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University. He has held solo exhibitions in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, London, Paris and Rome. Avishek’s work has been displayed at Gallery Espace, New Delhi; Aicon Gallery, New York; Albion Gallery, London; Apparao Galleries, Chennai; and CIMA Gallery, Kolkata to name a few. His work has also been displayed at numerous Art Fairs including FIAC Paris, Art Dubai, India Art Fair, Abu Dhabi Art Fair, Scope New York, Johannesburg Art Fair and Art Singapore. Apart from these, Avishek has participated in the International Festival of Contemporary Art, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Algiers, Algeria (2009) and the Arts Actuels Biennale, La Reunion (2011). He lives and works in New Delhi.
Deepa Narayan
Deepa Narayan is an international poverty, gender and development adviser who has worked at the World Bank, the United Nations and in the non-governmental sector. She was Senior Advisor in the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management group of the World Bank from 2003 to 2008. She served on advisory groups of the World Economic Forum for four years. In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine named Narayan one of 100 most influential global thinkers. India Today named her one of India’s 35 Great Thinkers. She has authored or co-authored seventeen books. Her groundbreaking Voices of the Poorstudies brought together the experiences of 60,000 poor women and men from 60 countries to re-examine core assumptions about poverty. Deepa’s latest book, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women, is based on 600 interviews with middle class and upper class educated women in metros, the book demonstrates why current approaches to women’s empowerment and leadership will not work and how these must be changed. It catalogues in detail every day behaviors clustered into 7 habits.
David Gilmour
David Gilmour is a writer and historian. His books include prize-winning biographies of Rudyard Kipling, Lord Curzon and the Italian writer, Giuseppe di Lampedusa. He is also the author of The Ruling Caste: Imperial Loves in the Victorian Raj (2005), a study of the Indian Civil Service in the Victorian era, and, most recently. The British in India: Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience (2018). Curzon: Imperial Statesman (1994) won the Duff Cooper Prize; The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling (2002) won the Elizabeth Longford Prize; and The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1988) was the winner of the Marsh Biography Award. He has also written The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples (2011), and several other books on Spain and the Middle East. David is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Oxfordshire.
Amita Kanekar
Amita Kanekar is a novelist, columnist, and an independent writer and researcher in architectural history. Her novel about the Buddha, A Spoke in the Wheel, was published by HarperCollins (2005) and republished by Navayana (2014). She has also written an architectural guidebook, The Portuguese Sea Forts of Goa, Vasai and Chaul (Deccan Heritage Foundation, 2015) and has published papers on architectural history. She also writes newspaper columns on issues of history, politics, and architecture. Amita teaches architectural history and theory at the Goa College of Architecture. Her second novel, Fear of Lions, about a rebellion during the late Mughal period, is to be published by Hachette.
