5 - 7 December 2019 , Thu - Sat.
GALF 2019 : Speakers | Programme | Partners | Performances | Artwork | Videos
Photo Gallery: Inaugural Day | Day 1 | Day 2
Niraja Gopal Jayal is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her most recent publication (edited) is Re-Forming India: The Nation Today. (Penguin Random House, 2019) Her book Citizenship and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press, 2013) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in 2015. She is also the author of Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and the Governance of Public Institutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Democracy and the State: Welfare, Secularism and Development in Contemporary India (OUP, 1999). She has co-edited The Oxford Companion to Politics in India, and is the editor/co-editor of, among others, Democracy in India (OUP, 2001) and Local Governance in India: Decentralisation and Beyond (OUP 2005). She has held visiting appointments at, among others, King’s College, London; the EHESS, Paris; Princeton University; and the University of Melbourne. In 2009, she delivered the Radhakrishnan Memorial Lectures at All Souls College, Oxford. She was Vice-President of the American Political Science Association in 2011-12.
Writer-painter, Amruta Patil is India’s first female graphic novelist. She is the author of Kari and the Mahabharata-based Parva duology (Adi Parva & Sauptik). Her recent book is Aranyaka: Book of the Forest. She is a Nari Shakti Puraskar awardee.
Maria Aurora Couto was born in Goa and studied in Dharwar and New Delhi (where she later taught English literature at Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University). She is the author of the widely acclaimed Goa: A Daughter’s Story and Graham Greene: On the Frontier, and has translated, from Portuguese, A.B. Braganza Pereira’s Ethnography of Goa, Daman and Diu. In 2010 the Government of India honoured her with the Padma Shri for her contributions in literature and education. She lives in Aldona, a village in North Goa.
Ivo de Figueiredo (b. 1966) is the critically-acclaimed biographer of Norway’s treasured cultural icon, Henrik Ibsen (Yale University Press, April 2019), and his next book is the official biography of Edvard Munch, commissioned by the Munch Foundation. In 2002, he was awarded the Brage Prize for a biography of Johan Bernhard Hjort, the co-founder of the Norwegian Fascist Party. A Stranger at My Table was influenced by such authors as W.G. Sebald and Daniel Mendelsohn. The book received one of the highest non-fiction honors in Norway, the 2016 Language Prize and was nominated for the Brage Prize that same year. Figueiredo works as a critic at Morgenbladet and Aftenposten and is a member of the Norwegian Academy.
Anand Teltumbde is a writer, columnist, political analyst, and civil rights activist associated with many civil society organizations. He is published regularly by all popular newspapers and progressive periodicals including EPW in which he wrote a column “Margin Speak”. His recent books are Republic of Caste (Navayana, 2018) and The Radical in Ambedkar (Penguin, 2018), Mahad: The Making of the First Dalit Revolt (Aakar, Delhi 2017) and Dalits: Past, Present and Future (Routledge, 2017). An alumnus of IIM, Ahmadabad, he has held top management position in the corporate world. As an academic, he taught in IIT, Kharagpur, and currently heads Big Data Analytics Programme at Goa Institute of Management.
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.
Supriya Nair is an editor and journalist from Mumbai. She writes a weekly books column for Mumbai Mirror. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Wisden and The New York Times. She is co-founder of All Things Small, a media company that specialises in non-fiction from the Indian subcontinent.
Sethu (A.Sethumadhavan) has been writing in Malayalam for the past five decades. A banker by profession and a writer by passion, he has around 40 titles to his credit, consisting of novels and collection of short stories. Many of his works have been translated into other languages, including English, Hindi, German, French and Turkish. His novels translated into English include Pandavapuram, The Saga of Muziris, Aliyah, The Wind from the Hills, Once Upon a Time, The Cuckoo's Nest and Jalasamadhi & other Stories. Kadambari, the Flower Girl is under print. Pandavapuram has already appeared in 10 languages. It has been filmed in Malayalam and Bengali, the latter titled Nirakar Chaaya, which had won recognitions abroad. Four of his works have been filmed, the latest being Jalasamadhi. A winner of all the major awards like the Sahitya Akademi award, Kerala Sahitya Akademi award(twice), etc, he was the former Chairman of the National Book Trust, New Delhi. Joining the State Bank as a Prob. Officer, he had retired as the Chairman & CEO of the South Indian Bank.
Masood Hussain, a prolific water colourist from Kashmir, collaborated in 2019 with the haikuist Gabriel Rosenstock from Ireland to publish "Walk with Mahatma," celebrating the sesquicentenary of Gandhi's birth. Masood honed his skills at Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Arts, Mumbai. He teaches at the Institute of Music & Fine Arts in Srinagar, Kashmir, where he was born and raised. “Kashmir draws us to imagine ourselves,” Masood says, “amidst her lush shades of green, crystal clear lakes, gushing streams, snow-capped peaks—a paradise that has sadly been in pathos now for over a generation. We need a Mahatma.”
M. Mukundan is one of the reputed fiction writers in Kerala, India, today. He writes in Malayalam language. Author of over forty books comprising novels, collections of short stories, a play and a study of modernity, his best-selling books include On the banks of the Mayyazhi, God’s Mischief, Kesavan’s lamentation, and Delhi Ballads. He pioneered modernity in Malayalam fiction.
He is recipient of Sahitya Akademi Award, for his novel God’s Mischief. Four of his novels were adapted to feature films, God’s Mischief winning the State Award for the best film. He is recipient of over twenty awards and honours including The Chevalier of the Arts and Letters conferred by the French Government, the First Crossword Award for Indian language fiction and the Gold Medal of Saddana Cultural Foundation, Dubai. His novel Kesavan’s Lamentation also won the Crossword Award. He was President of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi for three years.
His stories and novels have been widely translated into various Indian languages, English and French : On the Banks of the Mayyazhi (Manas, Chennai/DC Books, Kottayam), Gods Mischief (Penguin India), The train that had wings – Selected stories (Michigen University Press, USA), Kesavan’s Lamentation (Rupa & Co, Delhi) and Sur les rives du fleuve de Mahe (Actes Sud, Paris).
He lives in New Delhi and Kerala alternately.