5 - 7 December 2019 , Thu - Sat.
GALF 2019 : Speakers | Programme | Partners | Performances | Artwork | Videos
Photo Gallery: Inaugural Day | Day 1 | Day 2
Sanket Mhatre
Sanket Mhatrewas the chief assistant director of Kavyotsav 2001: the first bilingual poetry reading festival of Marathi and Kannada poets. He has held several poetry reading sessions in Mumbai and across Maharashtra. He performed at Kavyahotra 2018, the 72-hour poetry reading festival in Goa with 9 poets from other languages. Widely published, he performs at old age homes under the program (नातवंडांच्या कविता or Poems By Grandchildren). He is a renowned lyricist. His title song for the daily soap 'Radha Hi Bawari' was awarded the best song at Zee Alpha Gaurav. Crossover Poems is his brainchild, that started with The Poetry Club to unify poets from multiple languages, and embracing sensibilities unique to every language. He is also the film director of Kavita Cafe archived on Youtube that captures the best of Marathi poets in recitation
Astri Ghosh
Astri Ghosh is an actor, writer and translator who has translated twelve plays by Henrik Ibsen into Hindi. In a project initiated by the Centre for Ibsen Studies, Oslo, she collaborated with nine other translators who were translating Henrik Ibsen's contemporary prose plays into Arabic (Classical Arabic and Egyptian Arabic), Spanish, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese and Russian. Astri has translated 20 books into Hindi, English and Norwegian, and her translations have been included in three anthologies. She is currently translating a novel from Urdu to English. A former journalist, she also does poetry performances and has acted in two films.
Tilak Devasher
Tilak Devasher is the author of three books on Pakistan: ‘Pakistan: Courting the Abyss’ (December 2016) that was termed ‘easily the best book on Pakistan’ by a noted Pakistani commentator – Khaled Ahmed; ‘Pakistan: At the Helm’ (July 2018). A Pakistani reviewer in Dawn termed it as ‘a book that any future leader of Pakistan ought to have by their bedside, simply because it is the sum of all that has gone before.’ The third book ‘Pakistan: The Balochistan Conundrum’ was published in July 2019.
Tilak retired as Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India in October 2014. He is currently a member of the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) and also a Consultant with the Vivekananda International Foundation.
During his professional career Tilak served in J&K, Delhi and abroad. He specialized in security issues, especially pertaining to India’s neighbourhood. Post retirement, he has continued to take a keen interest in such issues with special focus on Pakistan.
Tilak has taken to writing after his superannuation. Apart from his books, he has written articles for a host of newspapers, magazines and think tank journals. He also appears regularly on TV talk shows.
Tilak is an alumnus of Mayo College, Ajmer and St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.
Vince Costa
Vince Costa started his journey in the mid 90’s as an audio engineer and then moved to Australia to study Music Business Management. He later returned to Goa and in 2009 he started to write his first music album called “Saint and Sinner”.
A few years later he released the album, but he felt that as a storyteller he wanted to explore other mediums .
Over a four year period he produced his debut documentary, “Saxtticho Koddo - The Granary of Salcete” an ethnographic film about the agrarian culture of his village Curtorim and the intrinsic relationship rice has with the Goan people.
Vince believes that Goa is a sea of stories and so he founded RedMackerel to tell them.
Sujatha Fernandes
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.
Prajwal Parajuly
Prajwal Parajuly (b. 1984) is the son of an Indian father and a Nepalese mother. The Gurkha’s Daughter: Stories, his literary debut, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in the UK and longlisted for The Story Prize in the US.
Land Where I Flee, his first novel, was an Independent on Sunday book of the year and a Kansas City Star best Book of 2015. Parajuly’s writings have appeared in The New York Times, Guardian, Los Angeles Times, New Statesman and been performed on the BBC. He is the Clayton B. Ofstad endowed distinguished writer-in-residence at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri
Anungla Zoe Longkumer
Anungla Zoe Longkumer can best be described as a free individual discovering her way through creative pursuits in music, writing, filmmaking, and folk traditions.
Having travelled widely and lived outside Nagaland for most of her life, she is currently based in Dimapur, Nagaland, where she freelances doing some content editing, music, and filmmaking. She is the author of Folklore of Eastern Nagaland (2017) which contains translations of folktales, folk songs and real life accounts, collected from the six tribes who inhabit the more remote parts of Eastern Nagaland.
She has also recently made a short documentary film ‘Shot Awake - The Making of Changlangshu’s New Logdrum’ which was released on 2nd May 2019 in Kohima, Nagaland, and screened at the Bali Indigenous Film Festival in May, 2019, and at the Rainforest Fringe Festival in Sarawak, Malaysia, in July 2019.
Saee Koranne-Khandekar
Saee Koranne-Khandekar is an author and culinary consultant. She researches and writes primarily on food, where her interests include indigenous cuisines, baking, and culinary literature. She is the author of the widely reviewed Crumbs!: Bread Stories and Recipes for the Indian Kitchen and writes extensively on baking and regional cuisines in their historical and socio-cultural contexts, and has been awarded the Food Chroniclers Award, 2019. Her second book, Pangat; A Feast, navigates the many sub-cuisines of Maharashtra and attempts to break the myths that surround the food of the land.
Saee is also an amateur poet. Her work can be read on www.saeekhandekar.com, and in various print and online journals.
Albertina Almeida
Albertina Almeida is a lawyer, human rights activist, independent researcher and rights sensitiser. She holds a doctorate in law and teaches ‘Gender, Human Rights and Law’ for the MA in Women’s Studies programme at Goa University. She is also a member of the Board of Studies, Department of Women’s Studies, Goa University. Albertina engages and addresses meetings, symposia and workshops on social justice and rights issues. Among others, she is a Focal Point of the Feminist Law Programme of the Asia-Pacific Forum on Women Law and Development. She writes regularly for local periodicals and occasionally for the national media. Her writings can be accessed on the website of The Alzulaij Collective. She is the author of Tug and Tear: Dealing with Child Sexual Abuse (2008). Albertina has co-founded several rights initiatives and groups interrogating ‘development’, including Bailancho Saad, Citizens’ Initiatives for Communal Harmony, Saad Aangan, and SEZ Watch. She is also a legal consultant to various organizations working on gender and child rights issues, migrant concerns, transgender rights, and human rights. She has also been a part of official and civil society committees for advocacy and drafting of laws for women and children.
Arundhathi Subramaniam
Described as 'one of the finest poets writing in India today' (The Hindu, 2010), Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning Indian poet. Widely translated and anthologised, her book, When God is a Traveller (2014) was the Season Choice of the Poetry Book Society, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her new book of poems, Love Without a Story, was published this year with Westland Amazon.
As editor, her most recent book is the acclaimed Penguin anthology of medieval Indian sacred poetry, Eating God. As prose writer, her books include The Book of Buddha; the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life; and most recently, Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga (co-authored with Sadhguru).
She is the recipient of various Indian and international awards and fellowships, including the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Zee Women’s Award for Literature, the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy, the Mystic Kalinga award, the Charles Wallace, Visiting Arts and Homi Bhabha Fellowships, among others. She has written extensively on culture and spirituality, and has worked over the years as poetry editor, cultural curator and critic.
