GALF 2025

Speakers

Martin Thokchom is an aspiring writer and bookseller from Imphal, Manipur, India. He is the owner of Ukiyo Bookstore, a space dedicated to fostering a love for literature and connecting readers with meaningful stories. His involvement in the Ukiyo Literature Festival 2019 highlights his passion for promoting storytelling and creativity. Martin’s writing draws inspiration from the history and social realities of his homeland, often exploring themes of identity and human experiences. He believes in the power of stories to unite people and amplify voices that deserve to be heard. Through his work, Martin aims to share the rich narratives of Northeast India while contributing to the broader literary world."

Martin Thokchom

Martin Thokchom is an aspiring writer and bookseller from Imphal, Manipur, India. He is the owner of Ukiyo Bookstore, a…

Shubnum Khan is a South African writer and artist. In 2011, her first novel Onion Tears was shortlisted for the Penguin Prize for African Writing and the University of Johannesburg Debut Fiction Prize. Her second novel The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years was published in 2024 in the US, UK, South Africa and India. It was selected as a New York Times Editors Choice, an Indie Next Pick, a Library Reads Pick and made NPR’s list of Books We Love in 2024. In 2025 it was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Prize. She has been published in The New York Times, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Huffington Post, O, the Oprah magazine, Marie Claire and the Sunday Times. She has been shortlisted for the Miles Moreland Writing Fellowship for African Writers, selected as the Octavia Butler Fellow with Jack Jones Literary Arts and has been selected as a Mellon Fellow at Stellenbosch University. She has writing fellowships at Omi Writers in New York and the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai. She currently writes and draws where the bluest skies meet the warmest waters in Durban, South Africa.

Shubnum Khan

Shubnum Khan is a South African writer and artist. In 2011, her first novel Onion Tears was shortlisted for the…

Neelakantan RS

Neelakantan RS

trained as an Engineer at Clemson University and is the Chief Data Scientist for one of India’s largest FinTech firms.…

Rupleena Bose works as an Associate Professor at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. Her PhD is on Urban Folk Rock Music from Bengal. She has written several screenplays. She has written a non-fiction film, You Don’t Belong, that won a National Film Award. She also writes on cinema for The Hindu, The Hindu Blink, Firstpost, Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), Open, Biblio, The Print and others. She divides her life and livelihood between Aldona and Delhi. Summer of Then is her first novel.

Rupleena Bose

Rupleena Bose works as an Associate Professor at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. Her PhD is on Urban Folk…

Dalle Abraham is a writer from Marsabit County in Northern Kenya whose work explores the region’s fractured histories and spirited cultures. His nonfiction essays and stories have appeared in Errant Journal, Adda, Debunk, Chimurenga Chronic, Jalada, and Kwani?, and he writes regularly for The Elephant. A Caine Prize and Kwani? Workshop alumnus, Dalle is currently at work on a number of book length projects.

Dalle Abraham

Dalle Abraham is a writer from Marsabit County in Northern Kenya whose work explores the region’s fractured histories and spirited…

Aparajith Ramnath is an award-winning historian of science, technology, and business. He is the author of two books: Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M. Visvesvaraya (1861–1962) (Penguin/Viking, 2024), a biographical study of an iconic engineer and public intellectual who played a key role in modern Indian history; and The Birth of an Indian Profession: Engineers, Industry, and the State, 1900–47 (Oxford University Press, 2017), a pioneering history of engineers in late-colonial India. He has also produced several research papers and book chapters, and written for Scroll, The Wire, The Hindu, and FiftyTwo.in. Professor Ramnath was initially trained as an electrical engineer at BITS Pilani, and later as a historian of science and technology at Oxford University and Imperial College London. He has been an International Scholar of the Society for the History of Technology, a Charles Wallace India Trust grant awardee, a Sangam House writing fellow, and a recipient of the Young Historian of Science Award (2018) from the Indian National Science Academy.

Aparajith Ramnath

Aparajith Ramnath is an award-winning historian of science, technology, and business. He is the author of two books: Engineering a…

Vidya Dehejia is the Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University in New York, and the recipient of a Padma Bhushan conferred on her by the President of India in 2012 for achievement in Art and Education. Over the past forty years, she has combined research with teaching and exhibition-related activities around the world. Her work has ranged from Buddhist art of the centuries BCE to the esoteric temples of North India, and from the sacred bronzes of South India to art under the British Raj. This comprehensive scope is evident from her books: The Thief who Stole my Heart: The Material Life of Sacred Bronzes from Chola India, 855–1280 to Discourse in Early Buddhist Art: Visual Narratives of India; from The Unfinished: Stone Carvers at Work on the Indian Subcontinent to The Body Adorned: Dissolving Boundaries between Sacred and Profane in India’s Art; and from Delight in Design: Indian Silver for the Raj to Devi, The Great Goddess: Female Divinity in South Asian Art.

Vidya Dehejia

Vidya Dehejia is the Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University in New York,…

Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree and Provincials; Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal, a work of literary criticism; Missing: A Novel; My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories; and two collections of poems, Out of Syllabus and VIP: Very Important Plant. She teaches at Ashoka University.

Sumana Roy

Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree and Provincials; Plant Thinkers of…

William Dalrymple is one of Britain's great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton, Brown and All Souls, University of Oxford. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious President's Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is the co-host of chart-topping podcast Empire with Anita Anand. William lives with his wife and three children on a goat farm outside Delhi.

William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple is one of Britain's great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last…

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