Urvashi Bahuguna
(English: Poetry) Urvashi Bahuguna was awarded an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom in 2014. Her debut poetry collection, Mudscope, was selected for the 2017 Emerging Poet’s Prize and will be published in 2018 by The Great Indian Poetry Collective. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Orion, The Nervous Breakdown, Eclectica Magazine, The Fourth River, Barely South Review, Kitaab, Jaggery, The Four Quarters Magazine and elsewhere.
Laurence Boissier
(French: Fiction) Laurence Boissier, born in 1965, lives and works in Geneva. She is a graduate of HEAD, Geneva School of Art and Design, where she specialised in performance art. She received the Swiss prize for literature in 2017. Since 2010, she has been part of Bern ist Überall, a spoken word group of Swiss writers and musicians who give live performances mixing languages and Swiss dialects. Her published work: Noces (2010), Cahier des charges (2011), Inventaire des lieux (2015) and Rentrée des classes (2017).
Saudamini Deo
(English: Fiction, Non-fiction) Saudamini Deo is a writer and photographer based in India. She is one of the founding editors of the esoteric literary magazine RIC Journal. Her words and images have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Words without Borders, Scroll, Documentum, Seagull Catalogue, Asteri(x) Journal, Lancet Neurology, Kindle Magazine, etc.
Rajasekaran Devibharathi
(Tamil: Fiction) Devibharathi is a well-known Tamil writer, with four short-story collections and two novels to his credit. A selection of his short stories was published in English as Farewell Mahatma, and a translation of his first novel is forthcoming as The Loneliness of a Shadow. He is currently working on his third novel.
Mindy Gill
(English: Poetry) Mindy Gill’s poems have appeared in Australian Poetry Journal, Hecate, Mascara Literary Review, Island Magazine, Award Winning Australian Writing, and elsewhere. She has won the Tom Collins Poetry Prize, a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship, and the Queensland Premier’s Young Writers and Publishers Award. Her manuscript, August Burns the Sky, was shortlisted for the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. She is Peril Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief.
Lucas Hirsch
(Dutch: Poetry) Lucas Hirsch (b. 1975) is the author of four collections of poetry. Hirsch published his poems in Dutch, Belgian and American magazines and performed on stages in the Netherlands, Belgium and the USA. His poetry has been translated into English, Polish, Finnish and German. Hirsch currently is working on his debut novel and a fifth book of poetry.
Julie Iromuanya
(English: Fiction) Julie Iromuanya is the author of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (Coffee House Press), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Etisalat Prize for Literature, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Debut Fiction. Her scholarly-critical work is forthcoming in Meridians, Callaloo, and Afropolitan Literature as World Literature. She is an assistant professor in the creative writing MFA program at the University of Arizona.
Lee Jihong
(Korean: Drama) Lee Jihong is a writer of plays and operas. She also works as a play educator and a play therapist. Her main works include the plays Crimson Skirt, There is No Future and A Flower Thrown into Wind, and the operas Papa Garden, and The Daejeon Blues.
Dinesh Kafle
(Nepali: Translation) Dinesh Kafle is a Nepali translator based in New Delhi. He has translated Benyamin’s novel Goat Days into Nepali (FinePrint, Kathmandu) and Nayan Raj Pandey’s Nepali novella Ulaar into English (forthcoming: FinePrint, Kathmandu). He is currently working on translating Pandey’s novel Loo into English. He studied English literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Saudha Kasim
(English: Fiction) Saudha Kasim started out studying architecture in college, gave that up for graphic design before moving to a career in corporate communications. Along the way, she published short stories in various online journals. She wrote a starter novel that remains unpublished and is now working on her second, which she hopes will see the light of day soon. She lives in Bangalore, India.
Anandh Krishna
(Tamil: Poetry, Fiction, Non-fiction) Anandh Krishna is a consulting psychotherapist based in Chennai. He write in Tamil and has three volumes of poetry, two volumes of essays, a novel and a collection of short stories to his credit. He has also translated three European novels into Tamil.
Mira Beckstrøm Laurantzon
(Norwegian:) Mira B. Laurantzon grew up between the ocean and the forest at a peninsula in the Oslo fjord of Norway. She graduated with a masters in South Asian Studies from University of Oslo, before moving to the mountains to study at the Writers Academy. She has now returned to the peninsula from which she came and in a little house in the oak forest she is continuously exploring nature, sustainability and the relation between micro-macro, through various methods of text, body work and stories of food.
Amrita Mahale
(English: Fiction) Amrita Mahale was trained as an aerospace engineer at IIT Bombay and Stanford University. She spent a decade working in strategy and operations roles in technology startups before switching, in what she hopes is the last of her zigzags, to writing fiction. Her writing has appeared in Brown Paper Bag and Himal Southasian. She is currently working on her first novel, Common Ground.
Nandini Oza
(English: Non-fiction) After completing post-graduation with a Masters in Social Work, Nandini worked as a political activist for over two decades in Non-Government Organisations and people’s movements like the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA). Since 2004, she has been managing the Zindabad Trust, an organization that provides financial support to environmental and human rights work across the country. As part of this, she has been recording the Oral History of the struggle around the Sardar Sarovar Project in the Narmada Valley.
Mohit Parikh
(English: Fiction) Mohit Parikh is author of Manan (HarperCollins). He was awarded a Toto Award for Creative Writing in 2015 and an Honorable Mention – Best Book (Fiction) at The Hindu-Goodbooks Awards in 2015-16. His works have published in many Indian and international literary journals including Griffith Review (Australia), Burrow Press Review (USA), Out of Print Magazine and The Indian Express (India).
Vivek Shanbhag
(Kannada: Fiction) Vivek Shanbhag writes in Kannada. He has published five short story collections, three novels and two plays, and has edited two anthologies, one of them in English. He published and edited the literary journal Desha Kaala for seven years. His novel Ghachar Ghochar was published in English translation to international acclaim. An engineer by training, Vivek Shanbhag lives in Bangalore, India.
Lakan Umali
(English: Fiction) Lakan Umali is a student and writer based in Metro Manila, Philippines. He graduated with a BA in Anthropology from the University of the Philippines Diliman, and is studying for an MA in Sociology from the same university. His works have been published in Kritika Kultura, Science Fiction: Filipino Fiction for Young Adults, and Lontar: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction. He placed first in the Maningning Miclat Trilingual Poetry Competition (English Division).
Lauren Wallach
(English: Fiction, Non-fiction) Lauren Wallach was born and raised in Brooklyn. Her fiction has been published in Electric Literature, Joyland, Requited Journal, and The Collagist, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, HTML Giant, and artspace marketplace. Lauren holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and is currently working on her first book.
Noor Zaheer
(English: Fiction, Non-fiction) Noor Zaheer is a writer, researcher and theatre activist. Her important published works include: My God is a Woman (a novel), Silent Dunes, Raging Forests and Ret Par Khoon (short stories), Denied by Allah (a study of Muslim personal law), Mere Hisse ki Roshnai (non-fiction) and Surkh Karavan ke Hamsafar (a travelogue). She is a recipient of the Department of Culture’s Senior Fellowship and the Shikhar Sammaan.