5 - 7 December 2019 , Thu - Sat.
GALF 2019 : Speakers | Programme | Partners | Performances | Artwork | Videos
Photo Gallery: Inaugural Day | Day 1 | Day 2
Arjun Subramaniam
Air Vice Marshal Arjun Subramaniam is a retired fighter pilot from the IAF who has flown MiG-21s and Mirage-2000s. He is also a military historian, academic and strategic commentator with an interesting post-retirement career. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard and Oxford universities and Visiting Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is currently a Visiting Prof at Ashoka and Jindal Universities and has lectured extensively at war colleges in India and the US and at a wide range of Universities and think tanks in the US and UK including Harvard, MIT, Georgetown University, Oxford, Carnegie Endowment, RUSI and IISS. He is the author of ‘India’s Wars: A Military History 1947-1971 with the sequel being published next year. He writes extensively in the public domain on diverse strategic and national security issues.
Amruta Patil
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.
Martin Macwan
Martin Macwan is a human rights activist based in Gujarat. He has devoted his life and has been working for eradication of untouchability and caste-based discrimination. He is the founder of Navsarjan Trust and many other institutions. He also writes books for children on the issues of equality and non-discrimination. He has been awarded with Robert Kennedy award for human rights; the Gleitsman activist award; and recognized by the Human Rights Watch and others for his work. Through Navsarjan Trust, Martin has been able to do pioneering work for the eradication of Manual scavenging.
Ramita Gurav
Ramita Gurav is an associate professor at Xavier’s College, Mapusa, where she is teaching Hindi for more than 20 years now. She has also done her Ph.D. in Contemporary Hindi Theatre. She has presented papers on topics related to literature, theatre and media studies to various state, national and international seminars. She has done translations of Konkani poems, short stories and Marathi short stories in Hindi. She has also directed dramatizations of short stories of writer Premchand and poems by Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh.
Seema Mundoli
Seema Mundoli is a faculty at Azim Premji University. She has worked with NGOs involved in conservation, advocacy on mining, land and forest rights, and education of indigenous communities. More recently her research examines the social and ecological interactions around ecosystems in a rapidly urbanizing India. She has co-edited the ‘State of the Environment, Andaman Archipelago’ (Universities Press, 2006) and authored ‘Cities and Canopies: Trees of Indian Cities’ (Penguin India 2019, with Harini Nagendra).
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.
Sanjay Dharwadker
Sanjay Dharwadker is a writer of fiction and non-fiction.
Born in Naya Nangal, Punjab and educated at schools in Delhi and Jaipur, he has a master’s degree in pure mathematics from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani Rajasthan. Thereafter his career has spanned three continents and he currently advises the United Nations and national governments on identification policy, privacy, biometrics and related topics. He has lived in Delhi and then Johannesburg and is currently based at Utrecht in the Netherlands.
His first book published in 1998 was titled “Chipping Away the Blues” which contained essays on corporate humour. “Diamond In My Palm” (2019) is his first fictional work and he has already embarked on a second novel titled “Philosopher’s Mistress” which traces René Descartes journey through the Netherlands.
He also writes about other books, travel, histories, as well as identity in the contemporary world, technology and society.
He travels extensively with his partner, Kippy and enjoys a good game of Bridge.
Samrat Choudhury a.k.a. Samrat X
Samrat Choudhury is an author and journalist, and a former editor of daily newspapers in India’s major metropolises, Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. His first novel, The Urban Jungle, was published by Penguin Books in 2011. Some of his literary essays and short stories have appeared in translation in German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. His latest publication is an edited anthology titled Insider/Outsider, on this issue with relation to Northeast India, of which he is one of the two editors. He has recently relaunched East Wind, an independent quarterly for Northeast India, in collaboration with its founder.
Samrat was the Asian Leadership Fellow from India at the International House of Japan in Tokyo in 2018 and a Chevening Scholar at the University of Westminster, London, in 2019.
Amita Kanekar
Amita Kanekar is a novelist, an independent researcher in architectural history, a columnist on issues of history, politics, and architecture, and guest faculty at the Goa College of Architecture. She has written an architectural guidebook, The Portuguese Sea Forts of Goa; with Vasai, Chaul and Korlai (Deccan Heritage Foundation 2015), and two novels, A Spoke in the Wheel (HarperCollins 2005, and Navayana 2014), which is about the Buddha and set in the time of Emperor Ashoka, and Fear of Lions (Hachette 2019), the story of a peasant rebellion in the Mughal era.
Manohar Shetty
Manohar Shetty has published 'Full Disclosure: New and Collected Poems (1981-2017)'. His new book of poems is 'Borderlines'. His anthology: 'Ferry Crossing: Short Stories from Goa' has gone into several reprints. He has lived in Goa since 1985.
