5 - 7 December 2019 , Thu - Sat.
GALF 2019 : Speakers | Programme | Partners | Performances | Artwork | Videos
Photo Gallery: Inaugural Day | Day 1 | Day 2
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.
Augusto Pinto
Augusto Pinto is an Associate Professor of English at Dempo College in Goa. He is a book reviewer, essayist and translator from Konkani into English. He has translated several important Konkani writers over the last 30 years, most recently the short stories of Jayanti Naik in The Salt of the Earth (2017) and the poets Ramesh Veluskar, Soter Barreto and Vishnu Wagh in Goa: A Garland of Poems (2017). He is currently working on a book of plays on the eminent Goan dramatist Pundalik Naik. He is also a member of the Organising Committee of the Ambedkar Memorial Lecture Series that are conducted during GALF.
Naresh Fernandes
Naresh Fernandes is the author of Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay's Jazz Age and City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay. He is the editor of Scroll.in, a digital news publication.
Miniya Chatterji
Dr. Miniya Chatterji is CEO of Sustain Labs, a company based out of India, France, and New Zealand that turns around large traditional organisations to make them more sustainable. Sustain Labs’ current portfolio consists of large infrastructure companies, leading universities, government infrastructure projects in India, Europe, Africa, and Asia Pacific.
Miniya was Chief Sustainability Officer of Jindal Steel & Power group of companies 2014 - 2017, and prior to that she was in the senior management of the World Economic Forum 2011-2014 in Geneva where she led the WEF in Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Before that, Miniya was managing a Eur 200 million hedge fund in Paris for a few years. She started as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs in 2006 in London. Earlier, Miniya worked as policy analyst with Jerome Monod the Chief Counsellor to the President of France Jacques Chirac 2003 - 2006. Miniya is a frequent speaker at Davos and at other World Economic Forum regional summits. She is a Jury Member for the Million Dollar Global Teacher Prize and for The Circulars award that is given away each year at Davos. Miniya is a member of the parliament of Francophone writers.
She is a columnist for The Harvard Business Review, The Indian Express and The Pioneer.
Indian Instincts - essays on freedom and equality in India is Miniya Chatterji’s first book. The book was published by Penguin Random House and launched in India in March 2018. The book is a best seller in India and was reviewed by all leading publications. Additionally, it was launched and distributed in Switzerland, Singapore, and Sri Lanka. The book is being translated in to several languages. The Bengali language edition of the book, published by Sampark Publishing House will be out in November 2019. The French language edition of the book, published by Penguin Random House will be out in April 2020.
Miniya has a PhD from Sciences-po Paris. She was a research fellow at Columbia University and Harvard University. She is a Global Leadership Fellow alumna of the World Economic Forum.
Dhruv Bogra
Dhruv Bogra is the author of the adventure travel, non fiction book, ‘Grit, Gravel and Gear – Four Hundred days on a bicycle from the Arctic to the Andes’.
In 2016, Dhruv undertook a 14 month long transcontinental bicycle odyssey fraught with adventure, exploration and peril when he chose to plunge into the far end of the planet to fulfill a childhood dream of exploring the lands and indigenous culture of the Arctic, the Maya, Zapotec and Aztec in Mexico and Central America and the Inca in Peru. As he cycled alone for 15,000 kilometers across ten countries from the cold and barren wilderness of the unforgiving arctic tundra to the thin air of the Andes at 4500 metres he endured hardship, misery, catharsis, happiness, and unbridled joy.
He continues to be an adventure and endurance cyclist who has cycled extensively in the Indian Himalayas in Ladakh, Himachal, Uttarkhand, and Sikkim and the Western Ghats on his mountain bike.
Aruna Ganu
Aruna Ganu is a retired teacher, Department of Marathi, from St. Xavier’s College, Mapusa. She is also involved in translation of poems from Hindi to Marathi and has also written weekly columns for a Marathi daily, ‘Goan Varta.’
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.
Yvonne Vaz Ezdani
Yvonne Vaz Ezdani stays in Saligao, North Goa but lives for some months of the year with her family in Brisbane . She is an ex teacher turned school counsellor and an author of two books, 'Songs of the Survivors' published by Goa 1556 and 'New Songs of the Survivors' published by Speaking Tiger. Although the genre of these books is oral history, she is also interested in psychology and stories of the human mind and spirit. She loves reading ,writing and gardening.
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.
Meenal Shrivastava
Born in Jaipur, Meenal Shrivastava now lives in North Saanich, British Columbia where she is a writer and a professor of political economy and global studies at Athabasca University. Currently, aside from serving on several professional boards, Shrivastava regularly speaks on the erasure of women in historical narratives and issues in the global political economy. Her research has led to more than thirty peer-reviewed publications, more than seventy paper presentations, and two books. In Amma’s Daughters, her first work of creative non-fiction, Shrivastava weaves together interviews, her mother and grandmother’s writings, and archival research to tell the story of her remarkable family. The stories in the book show that the personal and the political are relentlessly interconnected, both in how our lives unfold and in how we curate human history(s). Individual stories make these connections immediate and personal by revealing the continuum between past and present, local and global, and us versus them.
