5 - 7 December 2019 , Thu - Sat.
GALF 2019 : Speakers | Programme | Partners | Performances | Artwork | Videos
Photo Gallery: Inaugural Day | Day 1 | Day 2
Mridula Garg
Equally proficient in Hindi and English, Mridula Garg has written in almost every genre in Hindi; 8 novels, 4 plays, 4 collections of essays, 1 memoir of fellow writers, 1 travel account and 90 short stories. Her latest work is a novel in English called The Last Email published in December 2017.
Her work displays both a wry sense of humor and self reflection. She does not adhere to traditions, Marxist, feminist or region specific. The familiar turns unpredictable as she discards stereotypes to uses irony to elucidate the axiom, I am my choices. If a book makes people angry yet does not allow them to put it down and ultimately forces them to rethink, it is most probably written by Mridula Garg.
Among other awards, her novel, Kathgulab was awarded the Vyas Samman in 2004 and Miljul Mann, the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2013. She received the Hellman-Hammet Grant from The Human Rights Watch, New York in 2001. She also received the Ram Manohar Lohia Samman from U.P Hindi Sansthan in 2014.
Aniruddha Sen Gupta
After completing a BTech in Aeronautical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1987, Aniruddha Sen Gupta worked as a journalist with a couple of path-breaking but not very widely-circulated Delhi city magazines, ‘City Scan’ and ‘First City’, before getting sidetracked into communications design. Since moving to Goa 12 years ago, he has returned to writing, and has had books published by Scholastic and Sage Publications, as well as a number of short works of fiction, non-fiction, and graphic literature in anthologies from Penguin, HarperCollins, and other prominent as well as less well-known publishers. He has also done some occasional journalistic writing, for magazines such as ‘Down to Earth’, ‘Himal’, and 'Indian Quarterly'.
Miniya Chatterji
Dr. Miniya Chatterji is CEO of Sustain Labs, a company based out of India, France, and New Zealand that turns around large traditional organisations to make them more sustainable. Sustain Labs’ current portfolio consists of large infrastructure companies, leading universities, government infrastructure projects in India, Europe, Africa, and Asia Pacific.
Miniya was Chief Sustainability Officer of Jindal Steel & Power group of companies 2014 - 2017, and prior to that she was in the senior management of the World Economic Forum 2011-2014 in Geneva where she led the WEF in Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Before that, Miniya was managing a Eur 200 million hedge fund in Paris for a few years. She started as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs in 2006 in London. Earlier, Miniya worked as policy analyst with Jerome Monod the Chief Counsellor to the President of France Jacques Chirac 2003 - 2006. Miniya is a frequent speaker at Davos and at other World Economic Forum regional summits. She is a Jury Member for the Million Dollar Global Teacher Prize and for The Circulars award that is given away each year at Davos. Miniya is a member of the parliament of Francophone writers.
She is a columnist for The Harvard Business Review, The Indian Express and The Pioneer.
Indian Instincts - essays on freedom and equality in India is Miniya Chatterji’s first book. The book was published by Penguin Random House and launched in India in March 2018. The book is a best seller in India and was reviewed by all leading publications. Additionally, it was launched and distributed in Switzerland, Singapore, and Sri Lanka. The book is being translated in to several languages. The Bengali language edition of the book, published by Sampark Publishing House will be out in November 2019. The French language edition of the book, published by Penguin Random House will be out in April 2020.
Miniya has a PhD from Sciences-po Paris. She was a research fellow at Columbia University and Harvard University. She is a Global Leadership Fellow alumna of the World Economic Forum.
Mukul Kumar
Mukul Kumar is a bureaucrat and and an author as well. He belongs to the 1997 batch of the Civil Services. An Indian Railway Traffic Service officer, he is at present working in New Delhi. He has studied Humanities from Delhi University, graduating from Kirori Mal College. He has also studied Public Administration at the prestigious Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi, which got him Master of Philosophy in Social Sciences.
He has been honoured with the National award for outstanding service to the Indian Railways .
His works as an author include two novels, ‘As Boys Become Men’ published in 2016, and ‘Seduction by Truth’ in 2018.
Mukul began his literary journey with the publication of an anthology of English poems ‘The Irrepressible Echoes’ in 2012.
Tweet the author at @writermukul, mail him at mail him at mukulkumar1703@gmail.com, message him at https://www.facebook.com/ writermukulkumar/ and visit http://www.authormukul.com.
Rakhshanda Jalil
Dr Rakhshanda Jalil is a translator, writer, and literary historian. She has published over 25 books and written over 50 academic papers and essays. Her book on the lesser-known monuments of Delhi, Invisible City, continues to be a bestseller. Her recent works include: Liking Progress, Loving Change: A Literary History of the Progressive Writers Movement in Urdu (OUP, 2014); a biography of Urdu feminist writer Dr Rashid Jahan A Rebel and her Cause (Women Unlimited, 2014); a translation of The Sea Lies Ahead, Intizar Husain's seminal novel on Karachi (Harper Collins, 2015) and Krishan Chandar's partition novel Ghaddar (Westland, 2017); an edited volume of critical writings on Ismat called An Uncivil Woman (Oxford University Press, 2017); and in the past year a literary biography of the Urdu poet Shahryar for Harper Collins; The Great War: Indian Writings on the First World War (Bloomsbury); Preeto & Other Stories: The Male Gaze in Urdu (Niyogi) and Kaifiyat, a translation of Kaifi Azmi’s poems for Penguin Random House and Jallianwala Bagh: Literary Responses in Prose &Poetry (Niyogi Books). Her latest book is But You Don’t Look Like a Muslim (Harper Collins), a collection of 40 essays on religion, culture, literature and identity. She runs an organization called Hindustani Awaaz, devoted to the popularization of Hindi-Urdu literature and culture. Her debut collection of fiction, Release & Other Stories, was published by Harper Collins in 2011, and received critical acclaim. She was awarded the Kaifi Azmi Award for her contribution to Urdu and the First Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu-Hindi Translation. She writes regularly for major newspapers such as Hindustan Times, Indian Express, The Hindu as well as magazines such as Outlook, Scroll, The Wire, etc. She is the Editor of the Taj magazine, a bi-annual book-length journal of the Taj group of hotels.
Namit Arora
Namit Arora is a writer, humanist, travel photographer, and former internet technologist. He grew up in Gwalior, studied at IIT Kharagpur, worked in Silicon Valley for two decades, took courses of dubious practical value at Stanford, and visited scores of countries before moving to Delhi NCR with his partner in 2013. He writes essays, reviews, criticism, travelogues, fiction, memoir, and history, often merging many forms at once, and tackling subjects as diverse as identity politics, artificial intelligence, Indian-Americans, eating animals, and cryptocurrencies. He is the author of The Lottery of Birth (2017), A California Story (US) / Love and Loathing in Silicon Valley (India) (2019), and an upcoming book on travel and history (2020). His home on the web is shunya.net.
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.
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.
Saba Hasan
Saba Hasan is a noted contemporary artist with a diverse multimedia repertoire developed over twenty five years of highly distinguished practice. Saba has been nominated for the Celeste Contemporary Art Prize for her video La Verite/ Haqeeqat/ the Truth; she is the recipient of the French Government Cultural Fellowship, the Moscow Foto Award, the Raza National Award.
Her works have been exhibited at major international venues like the 55th International Venice Biennale, the Met Brauer Museum New York, the National Gallery of Art Colombo, The Assab One, Milan and the Hohenburg Castle Austria. Saba works in a plurality of media comprising photography, video art, book sculptures, paintings and sound installations spanning contemplative, conceptual ideas and a long engagement with organic materials. Her use of natural elements like the sun, sand, leaves, water, the Urdu script, and her voice make her work idiosyncratic, nuanced and powerful. In a subtle thoughtful tone she reminds us that human consciousness is capable of creating a reality which is not only beautiful but also filled with hope which is so integral to our fractured world.
Nandita Haksar
Nandita Haksar was a journalist before her involvement in the women's rights movement forced her to take to law. For the past three decades she has worked as a human rights lawyer, campaigner. She has set many precedents in human rights and refugees law. She has taken up cases in the courts in India as well as appearing before international courts and committees. She has evolved and taught courses on human rights in various universities.
She was awarded a Degree of LL.D. (Honoris Causa) from NALSAR in recognition of her work in the field of human rights.
Haksar is no longer practicing law and has devoted her time to writing. She writes for various national and international journals including Scroll.in, Newsclick and Aawaz. She has published more than 15 books. Her publications include:
Framing Geelani, Hanging Afzal: Patriotism in the Time of Terror (2007) in which she writes about her experience of defending two Kashmiri Muslims accused of attacking the Indian Parliament, and Rogue Agent: How India's Military Intelligence Betrayed the Burmese Resistance (2009) in which she exposed the RAW, Indian’s external intelligence agency ; The Judgement That Never Came: Army Rule in North East India (with Sebastian Hongray, 2011); ABC of Naga Culture and Civilization (2011) which has been taught in schools for Naga children and; Across the Chicken Neck: Travels in North East India (2013); The Many Faces of Kashmiri Nationalism: from Cold War to the present Times (2015) and Framed as a Terrorist (with Mohammad Aamir Khan) (2016), The Exodus Is Not Over: Migrations from the Ruptured Homelands of Northeast India (2016), Antarctica: profits of Discovery Nationalism Beyond Borders (2018) and Kuknalim Naga Armed Resistance testimonies of leaders, pastors healers and soldiers (2019; co-authored).
