5 - 7 December 2019 , Thu - Sat.
GALF 2019 : Speakers | Programme | Partners | Performances | Artwork | Videos
Photo Gallery: Inaugural Day | Day 1 | Day 2
Meenal Shrivastava
Born in Jaipur, Meenal Shrivastava now lives in North Saanich, British Columbia where she is a writer and a professor of political economy and global studies at Athabasca University. Currently, aside from serving on several professional boards, Shrivastava regularly speaks on the erasure of women in historical narratives and issues in the global political economy. Her research has led to more than thirty peer-reviewed publications, more than seventy paper presentations, and two books. In Amma’s Daughters, her first work of creative non-fiction, Shrivastava weaves together interviews, her mother and grandmother’s writings, and archival research to tell the story of her remarkable family. The stories in the book show that the personal and the political are relentlessly interconnected, both in how our lives unfold and in how we curate human history(s). Individual stories make these connections immediate and personal by revealing the continuum between past and present, local and global, and us versus them.
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.
R. Benedito Ferrão
R. Benedito Ferrão has lived and worked in Asia, Europe, N. America, and Oceania. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at The College of William and Mary and currently a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow at the Xavier Center of Historical Research. Curator of the 2017-18 exhibition Goa, Portugal, Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar, he edited a book of the same title (Fundação Oriente 2017) to accompany this retrospective of the artist’s work. His scholarly writing appears in various international journals and edited books, including Research in African Literatures and Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism (HKU Press 2017); his fiction and creative non-fiction can be read in Riksha, The Good Men Project, Mizna, The João Roque Literary Journal, and other publications.
Usha Alexander
Usha Alexander is the author of the novels The Legend of Virinara (2018) and Only the Eyes Are Mine (2008); and the novelette, Leaving Idaho (2017). Her writing has been featured in 3 Quarks Daily, Scroll.in, The Punch Magazine, Pangyrus, and White Wall Review. Her life and work have taken her from Vanuatu, a Pacific Island nation, where she taught secondary school science as a US Peace Corps volunteer, to the corporate life of Silicon Valley, where she worked for Apple, and to many points between. She maintains an abiding interest in science, anthropology, and history. Usha grew up in Pocatello, Idaho, a remote little town in the Rocky Mountain region of the USA. Though currently residing in the National Capital Region of India (NCR), she carries her home within herself. You’ll find her on the web at www.ushaalexander.com
Mahendra Caculo
Born in 1962, Mahendra Caculo has always lived in Goa. He is a civil engineer by training and valuer of real estate. A renowned writer / speaker and much awarded personality in the field of valuation, he regularly conducts workshops on valuation all over the country under ‘Knowledge Series by Mahendra Kakule’. These workshops have received great response from the fraternity of valuers.
Mahendra started writing poetry at the age 54 on a dare by his childhood friend and has now published a book of poems in English aptly called ‘Late Blooms’ which was well accepted and widely acclaimed. His style of writing is simple, vivid and touches the hearts of the readers.
He has a faithful band of followers who liken his poetry to that in local Indian languages.
He is influenced by Kahlil Gibran, Pablo Neruda, Dilip Chitre and Arun Kolatkar.
Piya Bahadur
Piya Bahadur went to the US to do her master’s and lived there for several years until, one day, she felt that her two daughters needed to be closer to their grandparents and moved back to India. Before the motorcycling bug bit her, Piya was Regional Officer at the US-India Education Foundation and had also worked at the Indian School of Business. Piya is currently working on her startup, which makes software to help small businesses, especially women-owned, run more efficiently. She is happiest when she is on long walks with her children, or on the road, singing along to Kishore Kumar songs. Now that both her daughters are in college, Piya lives in Hyderabad with her husband, their cocker spaniel, and a black cat that pretends to be their pet.
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.
Niraja Gopal Jayal
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.
Nirmala Govindarajan
Nirmala Govindarajan is an author, journalist and social sector documentarian. She endeavours to build an equitable world through her writing. Her new novel Taboo (Picador, Pan Macmillan, 2019) is inspired by under-aged girls who are kidnapped and trafficked. Her recent novel Hunger’s Daughters (Om Books International, 2019) is born out of her experience of documenting in India's rural heartland. Nirmala has authored The Community Catalyst, recommended reading for civil services aspirants (Sapna Book House, 2016), and co-authored Mind Blogs 1.0 (Write Wing Media, 2010). In 2014, Nirmala co-curated the debut Times Literary Carnival, Bangalore, and in 2016, debuted the Literary Lounge series at the British Council, Bangalore. Most recently, Nirmala has pioneered the Writer’s Yatra and Reader’s Yatra experiences in offbeat locations. Nirmala dabbles in theatre, plays the western classical piano and violin. www.nirmalagovindarajan.com
Alfred Almeida a.k.a. Pogoat
Pogoat is a Goan writer, wrecked by the resource curse upon Goa. Nonetheless, he has never participated in a protest march, nor filed a complaint or even donated money for any environmental restoration.
Pogoat finds it disgusting to live in a society where on a regular basis we need to brutally protest and protect our basic human necessities. Immersed in a world building project of an equal world with the guiding light of Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Kerouac, Hemingway, Dr. Thompson and Bob Marley. He's regularly tormented by his own characters, their deceptions, their lies, their truth and their lust for everything.
