6 - 8 December 2018 , Thu - Sat.
GALF 2018 : Speakers | Press Release | Performances | Registration
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.
Perumal Murugan
Perumal Murugan is an Indian author, scholar and literary chronicler who writes in Tamil. He has six novels, four collections of short stories and four anthologies of poetry to his credit many of which are translated into English. The translated novels include Poonachi: Or the Story of a Black Goat (2018); Current Show (2017); Pyre (2016); One Part Woman (2015); and Seasons of the Palm (2017) which was shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize in 2005. One Part Woman, his best-known work, was shortlisted for the Crossword Award and won the prestigious ILF Samanvay Bhasha Samman in 2015. Perumal has also received awards from the Tamil Nadu government as well as from Katha Books. He was earlier a professor of Tamil at the Government Arts College in Namakkal.
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.
Manu S. Pillai
Manu S. Pillai is the author of the award-winning The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore (HarperCollins India, 2015), and Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji (Juggernaut, 2018). Formerly Chief of Staff to Dr. Shashi Tharoor MP, he has in the past worked at the House of Lords in Britain, and with the BBC on their Incarnations history series. Written over six years and researched in three continents, Manu’s first book, The Ivory Throne won the 2016 Tata Lit Live Prize for best first work of non-fiction and the 2017 Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. Manu is also text contributor to Serena Chopra’s Bhutan Echoes (Tasveer, 2016), and writes a weekly column for Mint Lounge. His other writings have appeared in The Hindu, Open Magazine, the Times of India, Hindustan Times, and other publications.
Asiya Zahoor
Asiya Zahoor teachers at a college in Kashmir. Asiya has studied Psycholinguistics and Literature at Oxford University and the University of Kashmir. Her area of interest and scholarship is the Diaspora, South-Asian mainly Kashmiri Literature, Psycholinguistics, and film. Asiya writes poetry and has curated a website Bol Bosh (www.bolbosh.net)
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.
S. R. Sundaram
S. R. Sundaram (aka Kannan Sundaram) is the Managing Director and Publisher of Kalachuvadu Publication Pvt. Ltd. He is also the editor and publisher of Kalachuvadu, a monthly journal for culture and politics. Kalachuvadu first established itself as a premier little magazine and has now expanded its scope beyond the reaches of a literary journal to function as a broad forum for politics and culture. Kannan co-organised ‘Tamil Ini 2000′, the international Tamil conference on 20th century Tamil writing. He has been on the International Visitor Program to the U.S. (2002) and the Frankfurt Book Fair Fellowship Programme (2007). He was also invited to the Visiting International Publisher program in Sydney in 2017 and to the Istanbul Fellowship in 2018. Kannan’s mission is to get the best of Tamil literature translated into other Indian and world languages and vice versa. He has published five books consisting of critical articles on Tamil media and politics and his sixth collection will be published this year.
Ganesh Saili
Ganesh Saili was born and schooled in Mussoorie, Uttarakhand. He also taught English at the Post Graduate College. Folks say: ‘What he doesn’t know about Mussoorie isn’t worth knowing!’ His books are a record of the goings-on in the pleasure capital of the Raj. Having grown up in the hills, from an impressionable age, he has trekked the high mountains recording in words and pictures the magic of the mountains. His work has been published in periodicals, columns and journals; and translated into two-dozen languages. His latest book, Wanderings in the Garhwal Himalaya (2017) takes the reader to the hills in a clutch of twenty-two essays and two hundred pictures. Other books include Icing on the Landour Cake (2000); Ruskin: Our Enduring Bond (2004); Mussoorie Medley: Tales of Yesteryear (2010); The Doon Valley across the Years (2012); Ruskin Bond: The Mussoorie Years (2013); and Gupp and Gossip from the Hills (2013). Many accolades have come his way. In 1994, his tale of travel to the mystery lake of Roopkund won the Panorama Film Festival Award in Houston. He won the Sanghi Trophy in 1995 and the National Award in 1996.
Jaideep Hardikar
Jaideep Hardikar is an award-winning Nagpur based journalist/writer. He is a core team member of the People's Archive of Rural India (PARI) and a Fellow of the Mumbai School of Economics and Public Policy working on water commons. He has worked with four different newspapers for over two decades, most recently with The Telegraph as its central India Assistant Editor. Jaideep's journalism appears in several digital and print media outlets, including the BBC, ruralindiaonline.org, New Internationalist Magazine, news18.org, Hindkisan, Divya Marathi, Indian Express Online, and others. He has been the recipient of many national and international fellowships and awards, including the prestigious Prem Bhatia award for environmental journalism and Sanskriti Award for Young Journalists. Jaideep was awarded an Alfred Friendly Press Fellowship in 2009. He was also a 2015 fellow in the Asia Leadership Fellow Program hosted by the International House of Japan and the Japan Foundation at Tokyo and a Monash-DFAT fellow in 2017. Jaideep is an author of A Village Awaits Doomsday (2013), translated into Hindi as Yahan Ek Gaon Tha. The book looks at people displaced by development projects. He is currently writing a second book on farmers’ suicides and cotton growers’ struggles in a globalised world.
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.
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