Trisha De Niyogi is the Chief Operating Officer and Director at Niyogi Books, an homegrown independent publishing house based out of New Delhi, India. In her current role, one of the things she focuses on is business development. While on one hand she has started new lists of fiction, non-fiction and translated books taking literature, art, architecture, history and culture from the Orient to the rest of the globe, on the other, she has been acquiring high quality content from around the world for the Indian subcontinent’s readership as well keeping in mind that publishing must be an inclusive process. It also tries to accommodate voices from both urban and rural India and also from the marginalized section of the society like the dalits, the oppressed and the religious and caste exploitation.
An avid reader, music aficionado and a cultural aesthete, she is a multi-faceted artist from Delhi, who is trained in Bharatnatyam and plays the piano. Filled with energy & an ardent desire to bring change, her other professional interests focus on the ‘education sector’ & the ‘cultural heritage of India’, wherein she aims to bring about social reform and contribute in policy making. She is an adviser to multiple organizations, including Heritage & Education organization called Heritageshaala and an Indian Literature initiative called Purple Pencil Project as well as a diversity and inclusion platform, Belongg.
Sanjeev Khandekar is a Mumbai-based visual artist, poet, and writer. He works mainly with environment, market & issues and with changing eco politics and neoliberal environment.
Mukul Kumar is a bureaucrat, novelist and poet. He is a civil servant, belonging to the 1997 batch of Indian Railway Traffic Service. His published works include three novels, ‘As Boys Become Men’, Seduction by Truth’ and Aarzoo-Arshan (e-book), and three poetry anthologies, ‘The Irrepressible Echoes’, ‘Catharsis’ and “Rhythm of the Ruins” that has recently been published in October this year. His 4th fiction is slated to come out next year. Mukul has been honoured with the National award for outstanding service to the Indian Railways, Bharat Nirman award for literary excellence by Bharat Nirman Foundation, and Poorvanchal Gaurav samman for his contributions to society as a bureaucrat and writer.
Mehul Devkala is a Gujarati poet, editor and an award-winning filmmaker. His first poetry collection SARJAN NI KSHANE was published in 2019. His poems have been published in reputed literary journals like Indian Literature, Parab, Shabd Shrushti, Etad, Navneet Smarpan etc. His poems have been translated in to Bengali, Malayalam and English. He has edited an anthology on the literature from North East India in 2015. He has been invited at various national level cultural events and literature festivals.
His short film based on Mahatma Gandhi received an outstanding achievement award at CICFF and got nominated for Golden Fox award 2021.
He has lived in cities like Pune and Mumbai for many years, which reflects in his work as a melancholy strain related to mega cities and global issues. He was invited as Gujarati language representative at All India Young Writers’ meet organized by Sahitya Akademi in 2019 and 2021.
Maithreyi Karnoor is the recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship for creative writing and translation at Literature Across Frontiers, University of Wales Trinity Saint David. ‘A Handful of Sesame,’ her translation of a Kannada novel won the Kuvempu Bhasha Bharati prize and was shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. Her poems were shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize twice in a row. ‘Tejo Tungabhadra,’ her translation of Vasudhendra’s Kannada is published by Penguin Random House. Her debut novel, ‘Sylvia: Distant Avuncular Ends,’ which is set partly in Goa, was published in 2021 by Westland and is forthcoming in the UK by Neem Tree Press.
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003 he co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and he remains one of the Lab’s Directors. Banerjee is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society. He is a winner of the Infosys Prize a co-recipient of the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his groundbreaking work in development economics research.
Abhijit is the author of a large number of articles and five books, including Poor Economics, which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year, and Good Economics for Hard Times, both co-authored with Esther Duflo. He is the editor of three more books and has directed two documentary films. Banerjee has served on the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. He is a trustee of Save the Children USA and the Chair of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel and the Global Advisory Board for Covid-19 Response of the government of West Bengal.
Cheyenne Olivier is a french illustrator based in the Basque country. She playfully builds her images from squares, circles and triangles and tell stories with an ecological and social perspective. She illustrated Abhijit Banerjee’s cookbook Cooking To Save Your Life and she is collaborating with Esther Duflo on a series of children’s picture books about poverty, published in France in 2022 and soon to be published in India. While working for newspapers like The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveller and Times Of India, she continues her PhD in children’s literature and illustration at the University of Tours and the Orléans Art and Design School. She won the Young Talent Award at the Angoulême International Comic Festival in 2016 and the Regional Futur Prize from the French Crafts Institute in 2015.
From its inception in 2010, the unique, homegrown, volunteer-driven and non-profit Goa Arts and Literature Festival (GALF) has slowly emerged as one of the premier cultural showcases of India.
