Khalid Anis Ansari

Khalid Anis Ansari is Senior Assistant Professor at Glocal Law School, Glocal University, Saharanpur (UP) and broadly works in the field of social and cultural theory with special focus on democratic transformation and subaltern counterpublics, caste and religion, and social histories of the marginalized. He has worked on various research and community development projects and has been associated with democratic movements in North India as an interlocutor and knowledge activist. He was awarded the HIVOS PhD Fellowship—Pluralism Knowledge Programme (2010-2013) for his doctoral work with University of Humanistic Studies (UvH), Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Himanshu Suri

Himanshu Suri

Himanshu Suri Punjabi-American rapper, founder of Greedhead Music, and native New Yorker, Himanshu "Heems" Suri wants to have his ladoo and eat it too. He launched his solo career while a member of alternative hip-hop group Das Racist. In 2012 under rap name Heems, he released two solo mixtapes, Nehru Jackets and Wild Water Kingdom. After Das Racist split in late 2012, Heems headed to Bombay and began work on his official debut solo effort. The album was released in 2015 and coincided with an exhibition of the rapper's artwork at the Aicon Gallery in New York City. Both the LP and the exhibition shared the same title, Eat Pray Thug. Since releasing the album Heems completed a 30-city North American tour in support of the album with dates in Europe, Asia, and Australia to follow. Heems is from Queens, NY but went to high school in TriBeCa at Stuyvesant H.S., blocks away from 9/11 when it occurred. He then went to Wesleyan University where white people scared him at first but then I realized they weren't that different from me. They just preferred their food bland, and I spicy. And they can't dance yo.

Meena Alexander

Meena Alexander

Meena Alexander is considered one of the finest poets of her generation. Her eighth book of poetry Atmospheric Embroidery has just been published in India (New Delhi, Hachette India, 2015). Her works include the PEN Award winning book of poems Illiterate Heart and Birthplace with Buried Stones (published by TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press). She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Fault Lines (one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of the Year). She has also published two novels, one of which is Nampally Road ; two books of essays on poetics and two academic studies. She is the editor of Indian Love Poems (Knopf/ Everyman’s Library). Her poems have been widely translated and set to music, most recently by the Swedish composer Jan Sandstrom, performed in Stockholm by the Serikon Music Ensemble and the Swedish Radio Choir. Her awards include those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Arts Council of England and the Rockefeller Foundation for a residency at Bellagio. In 2014 she was named a National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. She is Distinguished Professor of English, Graduate Center/ Hunter College, CUNY. www.meenaalexander.com

Keki N. Daruwalla

Keki N. Daruwalla

Keki N. Daruwalla has been publishing poetry since 1970 when he came out with his first volume Under Orion. He has now 11 poetry volumes including “Collected Poems” (Penguin 2006) and Selected Poems (ARC Publishers Todmorden, UK 2008). He has four short story books. His latest publication was the Novel “For Pepper and Christ 2009 (Penguin) which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Fiction Prize (Asia, UK 2010). Penguin India published his Selected Short Stories, under the title Love Across the Salt Desert in 2011. Daruwalla also has to his credit a short story book entitled “Islands” published by Tranquebar (2014) and a poetry volume “Fire Altar: Poems on the Persians and the Greeks” published by HapperCollins (2013). His novel, “Ancestral Affairs” will be published by HarperCollins in November 2015. He won the Commonwealth Poetry Price, Asia in 1987, for his book Landscapes. He was the Chair of the Jury for the DSC prize in 2014. Daruwalla lives in Delhi.

Venkat Dhulipala

Venkat Dhulipala

Venkat Dhulipala is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. His book Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India has attracted much critical acclaim since its publication in February 2015 by Cambridge University Press. He has a doctorate in History from the University of Minnesota besides degrees from the University of Wisconsin Madison and University of Hyderabad.

Harsh Mander

Harsh Mander

Harsh Mander, human rights worker, writer, columnist, scholar and teacher, works with survivors of mass violence, hunger, homeless persons and street children. His books include ‘Unheard Voices: Stories of Forgotten Lives’, ‘The Ripped Chest: Public Policy and the Poor in India’, ‘Fear and Forgiveness: The Aftermath of Massacre’, ‘Fractured Freedom: Chronicles from India’s Margins’, ‘Untouchability in Rural India’ (co-authored), ‘Ash in the Belly: India’s Unfinished Battle against Hunger’ and ‘Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India’. He regularly writes columns for the Hindu, and Hindustan Times, and contributes regularly to scholarly journals. He writes and speaks regularly on issues of social justice. He teaches courses on poverty and governance in IIM, Ahmedabad. Past teaching assignments include LBS National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie; St Stephen’s College, Delhi; Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, Jamia. He also lectured at California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco; Centre for Law and Governance, JNU; IDS, Sussex; NALSAR Hyderabad; MIT, Boston, UCLA, Stanford, Austin, and several others.

Kornelia Santoro

Kornelia Santoro

“Kitchen goddess, mother, cookbook author.” With these words Kornelia Santoro describes herself. Two decades ago, she gave up her career as political journalist at a newspaper in Bavaria. After two years of riding an Enfield Bullet through India, she married her Italian husband and soon after a son was born. Nowadays, she channels her literary ambitions and her experiences as a passionate foodie into writing cookbooks and managing a website and a blog. Both her books, Kornelia’s Kitchen – Mediterranean Cooking for India and Kornelia’s Kitchen 2 – Cooking for Allergies, have won the prestigious Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. Her new book, dealing with the mood influencing qualities of food, will be published by HarperCollins India in June 2016.

Ranjit Hoskote

Ranjit Hoskote

Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, cultural theorist and curator. He is the author of more than 25 books, ranging across poetry, art criticism, cultural history and poetry in translation. His collections of poetry include Central Time (Penguin, 2014), Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006) and Die Ankunft der Vogel (Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006). His translation of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). He is the editor of Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2012), which is the first annotated critical edition of a major Anglophone Indian poet's work. With Ilija Trojanow, he has co-authored Kampfabsage (Random House/ Blessing Verlag, 2007; in English as Confluences: Forgotten Histories from East and West, Yoda Press, 2012). Hoskote has also co-authored, with Nancy Adajania, The Dialogues Series (Popular/ Foundation B&G, 2011), an unfolding programme of artist conversations. With Maria Hlavajova, he is the editor of Future Publics: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art (BAK, 2014).

Imre Bangha

Imre Bangha

Dr Imre Bangha is Associate Professor of Hindi at the University of Oxford. He studied Indology in Budapest and holds a Ph.D. in Hindi from Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. He has published English, Hindi and Hungarian books and articles on literature in Brajbhasha and other forms of old Hindi and prepared Hungarian translations from various South Asian languages. His work on the international reception of Bengali culture include the monograph Hungry Tiger: Encounter between India and Central Europe (2007) and Jöttem a Gangesz partjairól: Bengáli kultúra és magyar irodalom. (I have come from the banks of the Ganges’: Bengali Culture and Hungarian Literature, 2011 in Hungarian) as well as the edited volumes Rabindranath Tagore: Hundred Years of Global Reception (2014, co-edited with M. Kämpchen) and Tagore Beyond his Language (forthcoming).

Dilip Borkar

Dilip Borkar

Dilip Borkar is an Indian writer, who writes in his mother tongue Konkani and also other languages such as Marathi, Hindi and English. He is well known in literature, journalism, docu-film production and socio-political activities. He is popular for his satirical writing, and has 2 novels, 1 poetry collection, 7 books of children’s literature, 2 one act play collection, 5 dramas, 3 travelogues, 5 literary essay collection, 3 translation in his credit. He has produced documentary films on various personalities and subjects for the Govt. of Goa and corporate houses. As a columnist he has contributed several articles in various newspapers and periodicals. He is the Chief Editor of popular family Konkani monthly magazine ‘Bimb’. Besides Sahitya Akademi Award for his travelogue, he has several National and state Awards in his credit, including three National Awards for All India Radio, Play wright competition, Dr. T. M. A. Pai Foundation Award, New Goan overseas Award, ‘Rajya Sanman’, Goa State Cultural Award etc. for his creative work.