FACILITATORS
Core Faculty
Anil Menon
Anil Menon’s short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines including Interzone, Interfictions, Strange Horizons, Jaggery Lit Review and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. His short stories have been translated into Hindi, Tamil, Chinese, Czech, French, German, Hebrew and Romanian.
His debut novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet (Zubaan Books, 2010) was short-listed for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword award and the Carl Brandon Society’s 2011 Parallax Award. Along with Vandana Singh, he co-edited Breaking the Bow (Zubaan Books 2012), an international anthology of speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana epic. His most recent work is the novel Half Of What I Say (Bloomsbury, 2015), described by Biblio.in as a “paradigm changer”, was short-listed for the Hindu Literary Prize 2016.
Akshat Nigam
Akshat Nigam holds a Master’s Degree in English Literature and has worked in the field of Arts Education for nearly a decade. He teaches Literature, Creative Writing and Communication.
Akshat has been performing as a professional Storyteller for children and for adults since 2015. He debuted in ‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’. His current performance under the collective The Forty Thieves, called ‘Error 404: Life Not Found‘ opened in theatres in March 2016, while another show titled ‘An Uneasy Truce: Stories about Fear‘ opened in June 2016. In 2017, Akshat co-wrote ‘In Search of Dariya Sagar’, a play that won The Hindu Playwright Award for scriptwriting that year.
Currently Akshat composes audio tours on Mumbai for a tourism app called Hop On India, covering Colaba, Dadar Parsi Colony, Elephanta and Kanheri Caves among others.
Pervin Saket
Pervin Saket was shortlisted for the Random House India Writers Bloc Award 2013 and is the author of a novel Urmila (Jaico, India, 2016), of a children’s series Adventures @ Miscellaneous Shelf Four and of a collection of poems A Tinge of Turmeric, (Writers Workshop, India, 2009). Her novel has been adapted into an acclaimed dance drama featuring classical forms of Odissi, Bharatnatyam and Kathak.
Pervin is a certified Creative Writing Trainer from British Council. Her short fiction has appeared in Journeys (Sampad, UK, 2010), Breaking the Bow – Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana, (Zubaan, India, 2012), The Asian Writer Collection (Dahlia, UK, 2010), Aliens (Prime Books, USA, 2013), Earthen Lamp Journal (2014), Khabar, Love Across Borders – An Anthology by Indian and Pakistani Writers, Page Forty Seven and others. Pervin’s poetry has been featured in Kritya, Platform, The Binnacle (University of Maine, USA), Veils, Halos and Shackles, Helter Skelter and elsewhere. She works as an editor, developing academic books.
Past Faculty
Ravi Shankar | Guest Faculty 2019
Ravi Shankar has published or edited over a dozen books, including the Muse India award-winning Tamil translations of 9th century poet/saint, Andal, ‘The Autobiography of a Goddess,’ the 2011 National Poetry Review Prize winner, ‘Deepening Groove’ and the 2005 Finalist for the Connecticut Book Awards, ‘Instrumentality.’
Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited W.W. Norton’s ‘Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond,’ called “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer.
He has won a Pushcart Prize and a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, been featured in such venues as The New York Times, The Paris Review and the Chronicle of Higher Education, appeared as a commentator on the BBC, the PBS Newshour and National Public Radio, received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Corporation of Yaddo, and has taught around the world, including at Columbia University, and City University of Hong Kong.
He is the founding editor of Drunken Boat, one of the world’s oldest online journals. He holds a research fellowship from the University of Sydney and his ‘Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems 1997-2017’ was published by Recent Works Press in 2018 and his collaborative chapbook, ‘A Field Guide to Souther China’ written with T.S. Eliot Prize winner George Szirtes will be published in 2019 by Eyewear Publishing.
Himanjali Sankar | Guest Faculty 2018
Himanjali Sankar is an editor and author. She did her Masters and MPhil in English Literature from JNU. Her book for children, The Stupendous Timetelling Superdog, was shortlisted for the Crossword Award for Children’s Writing in 2013 and her YA novel, Talking of Muskaan, was on the Crossword shortlist for 2016.Her first novel for adults, Mrs C Remembers, was published in June 2017. Apart from teaching literature at the University of Indianapolis for a couple of semesters, she’s been an Editor with several publishing houses in New Delhi for over ten years now. She is currently the Editorial Director at Simon and Schuster India.
Anjum Hasan | Guest Faculty 2017
Anjum Hasan is the author of the novels The Cosmopolitans, Neti, Neti and Lunatic in my Head, and the short story collection Difficult Pleasures. She has also published a book of poems called Street on the Hill. Her new collection of stories, A Day in the Life, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House.
Anjum’s books have been nominated for various awards including the Man Asian Literary Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the Hindu Best Fiction Award and the Crossword Fiction Award. She was the Charles Wallace Writer-in-Residence at the University of Canterbury and has done visiting writer stints at Jawaharlal University, Delhi University and Jamia Milia Islamia. She has taught creative writing at various workshops across the country and is one of the co-founders of Bangalore’ World Famous Semi-Deluxe Writing Program.
Her short stories, essays and poems are widely published including in Granta, Baffler, Five Dials, Wasafiri, Drawbridge, Los Angeles Review of Books, Asia Literary Review, Caravan, Outlook, Hindu and anthologies such as A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces: Extraordinary Short Stories from the 19th Century to the Present and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets.
Zac O’Yeah | Guest Faculty 2017
Zac O’Yeah has a diploma in creative writing from the University of Gothenburg and studied linguistics and theatre science at the University of Stockholm. He has published 13 books including several fiction and non-fiction bestsellers, and is currently a regular freelance contributor to The Hindu and Business Line newspapers. His travel writings have appeared in magazines such as National Geographic Traveller, Outlook Traveller, RES and Vagabond, and also been included in many anthologies. All in all he has written for more than 75 different publications – including Times of India, Indian Express, New Indian Express, Forbes, GQ, and too many others.
His writings have been translated into German, French, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Russian, Chinese and Kannada. He has previously taught writing workshops in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Panjim and other Indian cities and is one of the founders of Bangalore’s World-Famous Semi-Deluxe Writing Program, the first semi-professional writing school in India. His forthcoming books this winter of 2017/2018 include the novel Tropical Detective (PanMacmillan) and A Walk Through Barygaza (Amazon/Westland Publishing).
Arundhathi Subramaniam | Guest Faculty 2016
Arundhathi Subramanium is a poet and writer based in Mumbai. She has published three collections of poetry: When God Is A Traveller (Harper Collins, 2014), Where I Live (Allied, 2005) and On Cleaning Bookshelves (Allied, 2001), is the author of a prose study, The Book of Buddha (Penguin, 2005), and was co-editor of Confronting Love (Penguin, 2005), an anthology of contemporary Indian love poetry in English. Translated into Hindi, Tamil, Italian and Spanish, her poetry has been widely anthologised. She was awarded the Charles Wallace Fellowship at the University of Stirling in 2003. In 2006 she toured the UK for a series of poetry readings on a Visiting Arts fellowship, organised by the Poetry Society, during which she often had occasion to illuminate the audience on her (often embattled) position as an Indian poet who writes in English. She has participated in several international poetry festivals and conferences in India and Europe.
Subramaniam is India’s country editor for the Poetry International Web and has run Chauraha, an interactive arts forum at Mumbai’s National Centre for the Performing Arts, for several years. As an arts critic, she writes on literature and dance for various leading newspapers and publications.
Amit Chaudhuri | Guest Faculty 2016
Amit Chaudhuri is the author of six novels, the latest of which is Odysseus Abroad. His first major work of non-fiction, Calcutta: Two Years in the City, was published in the UK and India in 2013. It was published by Knopf in the US in September 2013. His second book of essays, Telling Tales, was published in the UK in August 2013.
Jonathan Coe in the London Review of Books has said that ‘Chaudhuri has already proved that he can write better than just about anybody of his generation’, the Guardian called him ‘one of his generation’s best writers’, the Village Voice said he was ‘one of the most talented and versatile writers of his generation’, and, according to the Boston Globe, ‘In the gloriously crowded world of modern Indian fiction, Amit Chaudhuri stands out as a master craftsman who, with exquisite wit and grace, can depict a rapidly changing India in a single life and an entire life in a single detail.’ The Irish critic Eileen Battersby said in the Irish Times: ‘Even in the context of contemporary Indian writing in English, much of which is outstanding, Chaudhuri is the best’.
The critic James Wood cited him as one of his three favourite younger living writers in the New York Times, along with Alan Hollinghurst and Ben Marcus.
Among the prizes he has won for his fiction are the Commonwealth Literature Prize, the Betty Trask award, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Indian government’s Sahitya Akademi Award. In 2012, he was awarded the West Bengal government’s Rabindra Puraskar for his book On Tagore.
Amit Chaudhuri is one of the most influential critics of his generation. His monograph, D H Lawrence and ‘Difference’ was called a ‘classic’ by Tom Paulin in his preface to the book, and a ‘path-breaking work’ by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books. His book of critical essays, Clearing a Space, was called the ‘best work of criticism by an Indian’ by Caravan magazine, India’s leading journal of the ideas. In 2013, he became the first person to be awarded the Infosys Prize for outstanding contribution to the humanities in Literary Studies, from a jury comprising Amartya Sen, the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia University), the critic Homi Bhabha (Harvard), the South Asia scholar Sheldon Pollock (Columbia), former Indian chief justice Leila Seth, and the legal thinker Upendra Baxi (Warwick).
In his congratulatory address, Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize winner and jury chair of the first Infosys Prize for the Humanities, said: ‘He is of course a remarkable intellectual with a great record of literary writing showing a level of sensibility as well as a kind of quiet humanity which is quite rare. It really is quite extraordinary that someone could have had that kind of range that Amit Chaudhuri has in terms of his work and it could be so consistently of the highest quality.’ Chaudhuri is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the English Association, and was a judge of the Man Booker International Prize. In 2008, a Guardian editorial about him appeared in the newspaper’s famous ‘In Praise of…’ series, the first time an Indian writer was so honoured. In its editorial, the Guardian called him ‘a publisher’s nightmare’ for his artistic impulses and experimental tendencies.
His first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, is included in Colm Toibin and Carmen Callil’s Two Hundred Best Novels of the Last Fifty Years. His second novel, Afternoon Raag, was on Anne Enright’s list of 10 Best Short Novels in the Guardian. He is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, and is editor of the Picador/ Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature. He has one book of poetry, St Cyril Road And Other Poems.
