5 - 7 December 2019 , Thu - Sat.
GALF 2019 : Speakers | Programme | Partners | Performances | Artwork | Videos
Photo Gallery: Inaugural Day | Day 1 | Day 2
Dhruba Hazarika
Dhruba Hazarika was born in Shillong and educated in St. Edmund’s School & College. He served as a lecturer in economics for a brief period before joining the Assam Civil Service in 1983. In 1999, he was inducted into the Indian Administrative Service, serving in various capacities, and retired while in the rank of Commissioner and Secretary to the Government of Assam in early 2016. Post retirement, he was appointed as Member of the Assam Public Service Commission from where he retired in July 2018.
Dhruba Hazarika’s first step into the literary world began early in life, influenced as he was by his mother’s wide reading as well by the encouragement that he received from his teachers. From being the editor of the college magazine to his many published works over the years Dhruba Hazarika has written over a 100 short stories, essays published in various journals and newspapers. Till date, Penguin has published three of his books comprising two novels, A Bowstring Winter and Sons of Brahma; and a short story collection, Luck. His next collection of short stories Savage Men is due for release later by Speaking Tiger this year.
He has been a regular contributor during the last thirty years to The Sentinel, The Telegraph and, presently, to The Assam Tribune as well as to various magazines. Several universities in India have included his works in their academic syllabi. He has addressed various gatherings, academic and non-academic, on the art and craft of creative writing.
Dhruba Hazarika is a recipient of the DY365 Literary Award and the All-India Katha Award for fiction in English. He is a founder member of the vibrant North-East Writers’ Forum and is presently its President. Apart from reading and writing, his other interests include painting, woodwork, trekking and cosmology. He has travelled widely both at home and abroad but is happiest when with his family.
Arti Das
Arti Das is a freelance journalist based in Goa. She mainly writes about Goa’s art, culture, and ecology for various publications like The Hindu, Deccan Herald, Scroll.in, Mongabay India, to name a few. In her career span of around 15 years now, she has interviewed well-known artists, poets, and authors like Ramchandra Guha, Githa Hariharan, Damodar Mauzo, Anjum Hassan, Mahesh Rao, Amruta Patil among others. Along with this she is also involved in documentation of Goa’s culture and was recently part of the three-day ‘Inter-disciplinary Narrative Writing and Photography Residency’ in Goa, from February 22-24, 2019; organised by Goa Chitra Museum, Benaulim.
Maaz bin Bilal
Maaz bin Bilal is a poet, translator, and academic. His first collection, Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu, was published in 2019 by Yoda Press. He has translated Fikr Taunsvi’s journal of partition, The Sixth River, from Urdu into English (Speaking Tiger, 2019). Maaz received the Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship in writing and translation for Wales, 2018-19. He is an associate professor of literary studies at the liberal arts school of Jindal Global University, and holds a PhD from Queen’s University Belfast for his thesis on the politics of friendship in E. M. Forster’s work, which he is reworking into a monograph. Maaz also enjoys football.
Sunanda Mehta
Sunanda Mehta is a journalist with over twenty-five years of experience. She began her career at Femina and moved on to Magna Publishing, where she became the founder-editor of the Pune city magazine Citadel at the age of twenty-five. After this, she worked for the Indian Express for two decades, breaking many stories throughout her tenure. From 2010 to 2017, she was Resident Editor of the newspaper’s Pune edition, which made her the first woman editor of a national English daily in Pune.
A graduate of Lady Shri Ram College for Women where she studied History, Sunanda also has degrees in Education and Journalism. A former Chevening fellow, she has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Pune. Sunanda divides her time between Mumbai and Pune.
Heta Pandit
Heta Pandit worked with Dr Jane Goodall on chimpanzee research in Tanzania, East Africa. In 1983, volunteered with an NGO in Bombay advocating heritage conservation. She came to Goa in 1995 and continued writing on heritage.
A founder member the Goa Heritage Action Group, she has written 9 books: - Houses of Goa, Hidden Hands, Dust & Other Short Stories from Goa, Walking in Goa, Walking in Old Goa, Walking with Angels, There’s More to Life Than a House in Goa and Grinding Stories-Songs from Goa.
Heta is fluent in Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, and English. She also translates Goan literature from the Marathi language into English to enable this genre to reach a wider audience.
Katherine M. Hedeen
Katherine M. Hedeen is a translator, literary critic, and essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated some of the most respected voices from the region. Her publications include book-length collections by Jorgenrique Adoum, Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, Hugo Mujica, José Emilio Pacheco, Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, and Ida Vitale, among many others. She is a recipient of two NEA Translation grants in the US and a PEN Translates award in the UK. She is the Associate Editor for Action Books and the Poetry in Translation Editor at the Kenyon Review. She resides in Gambier, Ohio, where she is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College.
Tamal Bandyopadhyay
Tamal Bandyopadhyay is a bestselling author, an award-winning columnist, and a keen student of the Indian banking sector for over two decades. His weekly column `Banker's Trust' is widely read for its incisive analysis and informed opinion.
He is currently Consulting Editor with Business Standard and Senior Adviser to Jana Small Finance Bank Ltd.
One of the key members of the team that set up the financial daily Mint, Tamal was an adviser on strategy at Bandhan Bank Ltd, the first microfinance company to transform itself into a universal bank in India.
Nandan Nilekani has written the foreword to his latest book His latest book 'HDFC Bank 2.0: From Dawn to Dightal' which captures the biggest self-made disruptions in Indian banking.
Before this, he has written four books -- `From Lehman to Demonetization: A Decade of Disruptions, Reforms and Misadventures’, `Bandhan: The Making of a Bank,' `Sahara: The Untold Story' and `A Bank for The Buck'.
Incidentally, a Rs200 crore defamation case was slapped on him by the Sahara group to stop the publication of his book on shadow banking.
Tamal is one of the contributors to the `Oxford Handbook on Indian Economy', edited by Kaushik Basu, and ‘Making of New India : Transformation Under Modi Government’, edited by Bibek Debroy.
He won the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism (commentary and interpretative writing) in 2017.
Global professional network Linkedin nominated him one among top ten influential voices in India in 2018 and 2017 and one of the top 10 writers in finance globally for 2016 and 2015.
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.
Sujatha Fernandes
Sujatha Fernandes is a writer and professor at the University of Sydney. She is the author of several academic monographs, including most recently Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling (Oxford). Her literary work includes a memoir on a global hip hop life, Close to the Edge (Verso), and a forthcoming collection of essays entitled The Cuban Hustle (Duke). Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, New Ohio Review, Maine Review, and Aster(ix), among other places. She is currently completing a collection of interlinked short stories entitled Shadow People and is working on a novel about Goan migrants in coastal Karnataka during the colonial wars of the eighteenth century.
Mridula Garg
Equally proficient in Hindi and English, Mridula Garg has written in almost every genre in Hindi; 8 novels, 4 plays, 4 collections of essays, 1 memoir of fellow writers, 1 travel account and 90 short stories. Her latest work is a novel in English called The Last Email published in December 2017.
Her work displays both a wry sense of humor and self reflection. She does not adhere to traditions, Marxist, feminist or region specific. The familiar turns unpredictable as she discards stereotypes to uses irony to elucidate the axiom, I am my choices. If a book makes people angry yet does not allow them to put it down and ultimately forces them to rethink, it is most probably written by Mridula Garg.
Among other awards, her novel, Kathgulab was awarded the Vyas Samman in 2004 and Miljul Mann, the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2013. She received the Hellman-Hammet Grant from The Human Rights Watch, New York in 2001. She also received the Ram Manohar Lohia Samman from U.P Hindi Sansthan in 2014.
