contributors
Anish Garange works with Budhan Theatre in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. He belongs to a de-notified tribe called Chhara community. He has masters in Hindi literature and writes in Hindi, Gujarati and Bhantu. He was nominated for Ahmedabad Heroes Series for his work with Nomad Band, the music wing of Budhan Theatre, for educating children the art of making music with utensils used to distil country liquor. He writes about what he sees in his neighbourhood and believes it will bring change as his art has a purpose.
Anita Gopalan is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a fellowship in English literature from the Ministry of Culture. Her translations from Hindi include The Memory of Now (Anomalous Press, 2019, Poetry, Winner, Chapbook Contest) and Simsim (Penguin Random House, 2023, Fiction, Longlist, JCB Prize), both by Geet Chaturvedi. Her translation has also been selected by Jane Hershfield for Best Literary Translations Anthology (Deep Vellum, 2024).
Ashis Nandy is one of India's most significant thinkers and public intellectuals. His work spans the fields of political psychology, sociology, nationalism, public conscience and culture. He is the author of many books, some of them seminal in Indian thought, such as The Intimate Enemy and The Savage Freud. For many years he was a Fellow and a Director of the Centre for Developing Societies in New Delhi. He was awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2007, and the Hans Kilian Award in 2019.
Bei Dao was born in 1949. He spent eleven years working as a construction labourer. He is one of China's most significant poets, and has lived in exile since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. His work has been widely translated into English. His books in translation include The August Sleepwalker (1990), Old Snow (1991), Forms of Distance (1994), Landscape Over Zero (1996), Unlock (2000), The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems, and the most recent City Gate, Open Up, a memoir, translated by Jeffrey Yang. He is one of the founder editors of the literature journal Jintian, begun in 1978. Jintian published a new literature which expressed the importance of the imagination and of individual perception, long suppressed in the Chinese context. It was banned in 1980, and was later revived by Bei Dao in exile, and he continues to edit it today. He currently lives in Hong Kong.
Bei Dao was born in 1949. He spent eleven years working as a construction labourer. He is one of China's most significant poets, and has lived in exile since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. His work has been widely translated into English. His books in translation include The August Sleepwalker (1990), Old Snow (1991), Forms of Distance (1994), Landscape Over Zero (1996), Unlock (2000), The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems, and the most recent City Gate, Open Up, a memoir, translated by Jeffrey Yang. He is one of the founder editors of the literature journal Jintian, begun in 1978. Jintian published a new literature which expressed the importance of the imagination and of individual perception, long suppressed in the Chinese context. It was banned in 1980, and was later revived by Bei Dao in exile, and he continues to edit it today. He currently lives in Hong Kong.
Geet Chaturvedi is a poet, novelist and essayist. He is one of the most widely read contemporary Hindi writers. He has authored two collections of novellas, three collections of poetry, two books of nonfiction and a full-length novel. The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the Syed Haidar Raza fellowship for fiction writing, he was named among Ten Best Young Writers of India by the Indian Express. He won the 2021 Vatayan-UK Literary Award for his contribution to Hindi literature. His novel Simsim in English translation by Anita Gopalan won a PEN/Heim and was longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature. His works have been translated into twenty-four languages.
Hemang Ashwinkumar is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor and critic who writes in Gujarati and English. His poems have been translated into Greek, Italian and other Indian languages. His English translations include Poetic Refractions (2012), an anthology of contemporary Gujarati poetry, and Thirsty Fish and Other Stories (2013), an anthology of select stories by eminent Gujarati writer Sundaram. Penguin Random House India has brought out his translation of Gujarati Dalit writer Dalpat Chauhan’s novel Vultures (2022), and edited collection of short stories titled Fear and Other Stories (2023). His Gujarati translations of Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems (2020), Sarpa Satra (2021) have been critically acclaimed. His scholarly monograph Translating the Translated: Poetics and Politics of Literary Translation in India will be published by Orient Blackswan in 2024. His translation of eminent painter-poet Gulammohammed Sheikh’s collection of autobiographical essays Gher Jatan (On the Way Home) will be published by Seagull Books, Kolkata.
Jeffrey Yang is the author of four books of poetry: Line and Light, Hey, Marfa (winner of the Southwest Book Award); Vanishing-Line; and An Aquarium (winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. He is the translator of Bei Dao’s autobiography City Gate, Open Up, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies, Ahmatjan Osman’s Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile, and Su Shi’s East Slope. He has edited the poetry anthologies Birds, Beasts, and Seas and Time of Grief, a volume of Walt Whitman’s poetry and prose, The Sea Is a Continual Miracle, and an expanded edition of Mary Oppen’s Meaning a Life: An Autobiography. Yang has received fellowships from the DAAD artists-in-Berlin program, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Omina Freundeshilfe Foundation. He is the Editor-At-Large for New Directions Publishing and also edits titles for New York Review Books. His translation of Bei Dao’s Sidetracks will be published by New Direction in spring 2024.
Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD, is an Egyptian-American translator of poets and novelists from across the Arab world who translates from Arabic, French, and German. He has received the Sarah Maguire Prize for poetry in translation, an NEA translation grant, PEN Center USA's translation prize, Poetry Magazine's translation prize, a Fulbright research fellowship, and residencies from the Lannan Foundation and the Banff International Center for the Arts, among other honors. His book-length translations include work by Najwan Darwish (Palestine), Adonis (Syria), Dunya Mikhail (Iraq), and Rabee Jaber (Lebanon). He is also the author of the book The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice.
Manoranjan Byapari was born in the early-1950s in Barishal, Bangladesh. His family migrated to West Bengal in India when he was three. They were resettled in Bankura at the Shiromanipur refugee camp. They were subsequently forced to shift to the Ghola Doltala refugee camp, in 24 Parganas, and lived there till 1969. However, Byapari had to leave home at the age of fourteen to do odd jobs. In his early twenties, he came into contact with the Naxals, and he landed up in jail after that, where he taught himself to read and write. Subsequently he joined the famous labour activist Shankar Guha Niyogi, founder of the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha at the Dalli Rajhara Mines, who were leading a struggle to reclaim Adivasi lands from the feudal lords who had appropriated them. Later, while working as a rickshaw-puller in Kolkata, Byapari had a chance encounter in 1981 with the renowned Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, who urged him to write for her journal Bartika. He has published twelve novels and over seventy short stories since. Some of his important works include Ittibrite Chandal Jibon (an autobiography), Amanushik, the Chandal Jibon trilogy of novels, Anya Bhubon and Motua Ek Mukti Senar Naam. Until 2018, he worked as a cook at the Helen Keller Institute for the Deaf and Blind in West Bengal. Byapari's first major recognition came in 2014, when he received the Suprabha Majumdar Prize, awarded by the Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, for Ittibrite Chandal Jibon. In 2018, Interrogating My Chandal Life, the English translation of this autobiography by Sipra Mukherjee, was awarded the Hindu Prize for non-fiction. He is currently the chairman of the Dalit Sahitya Akademi in Bengal and was elected to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly in 2021.
Najwan Darwish (b. 1978) is one of the foremost contemporary Arab poets. Since the publication of his first collection in 2000, his poetry has been hailed across the Arab world and beyond as a singular expression of the Palestinian struggle. He has published eight books in Arabic, and his work has been translated into more than twenty languages. NYRB Poets published Darwish’s Nothing More to Lose, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, in 2014, which was picked as one of the best books of the year by NPR and nominated for several awards. His second major collection in English, Exhausted on the Cross, was published by NYRB Poets in 2021, with a Foreword by Raúl Zurita, and was awarded the Sarah Maguire Prize. Darwish lives between Haifa and his birthplace, Jerusalem.
Umesh Solanki is a poet, novelist, journalist, photographer and film maker all neatly rolled into one. He runs a poetry e-magazine called Nirdhar. With degrees in journalism and literature, he brings the lived reality of marginalized people into his work. As an editor, he has encouraged people writing in languages other than Gujarati to contribute to Nirdhar. His poetry has been published in Nirikshak, Dalit Adhikar, Nirdhar and Indian Literature.
V. Ramaswamy translates Bengali voices from the margins. He is best known for his long-term engagement with the anti-establishment writer, Subimal Misra, with The Golden Gandhi Statue from America: Early Stories, Wild Animals Prohibited: Stories, Anti-Stories, and This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale: Two Anti-Novels. The final Misra volume, The Earth Quakes, is under publication. Ramaswamy's translation of The Runaway Boy, the first novel in the Chandal Jibon trilogy by Manoranjan Byapari, was published in 2020. The Nemesis, the second part of the trilogy, was published in 2022. He was awarded the first Literature Across Frontiers – Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship in creative writing and translation in 2016 to translate the Chandal Jibon novels. Ramaswamy's translations of Memories of Arrival: A Voice from the Margins, by Adhir Biswas was published in 2022, as were Life and Political Reality: Two Novellas, by Shahidul Zahir (co-translated with Shahroza Nahrin) and Why There Are No Noyontara Flowers in Agargaon Colony: Stories. His most recent published translation is the novel, I See The Face, by Shahidul Zahir.