Allison Amend
(English: Fiction) Allison Amend is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She is the author of the award-winning short story collection “Things That Pass for Love” and the novels “A Nearly Perfect Copy” and “Stations West,” which was a finalist for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Oklahoma Book Award. Her most recent book, “Enchanted Islands,” was on the longlist for the International Dublin Award. Allison teaches creative writing in New York City and Oklahoma City, USA.
Mercedes Araujo
(Spanish: Fiction/Poetry) Mercedes Araujo is an Argentinian writer. Her work has received several distinctions and literary prizes She has six published books. She was born in Mendoza and lives in Bueno Aires.
Onaiza Drabu
(English/Kashmiri: Nonfiction) Onaiza Drabu is an anthropologist and her writing centers around themes of identity, nationalism and racism. Her subjects primarily revolve around Kashmir and Islam. She works on Kashmiri folklore and is currently working on a re- imagining of popular Kashmiri tales. Onaiza co-curates Daak – a weekly newsletter and website on historic literature and art from the Indian subcontinent.
Rayji De Guia
(English/Filipino: Fiction/Poetry) Rayji de Guia is a writer and an artist. Her work can be found in DANAS: mga pagaakda ng babae ngayon (Gantala Press), SCUM Magazine, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, MANILEÑO Magazine, harana poetry, The Literary Apprentice (Balangiga Press), Argot Magazine, and Riggwelter Press. She was a fellow for fiction in the 1st IWP Alumni Writers Workshop (2016), the 2nd Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio Writers Workshop (2017), and the 2nd GlobalGRACE-UP National LGBTQ Writers Workshop (2019). Her collection, “Neither nothing nor forgotten”, received First Prize in the Poetry Category of the 2nd Gémino H. Abad Awards for Poetry and for Literary Criticism (2019). Currently, she resides in an eighty-year-old ancestral house in Maragondon, Cavite with her family and some ghosts.
Muna Gurung
(Nepali/English: Translation/Nonfiction) Muna Gurung is a writer, translator and educator based in Kathmandu, Nepal. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a teaching fellow. Her fiction, non-fiction and translations have been published by The Margins, Tilted Axis Press, Himal Southasian, Words Without Borders, Roads&Kingdoms and The Record. Muna writes a monthly column for Nepali Times where she interviews women writers in the Nepali literary scene. She is the founder of KathaSatha.
Shreya Ila Anasuya
(English: Fiction/Nonfiction) Shreya Ila Anasuya is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, an independent journalist, and the managing editor of Skin Stories, a publication by Point of View Mumbai. Shreya has a BA in English Literature from Jadavpur University and an MA in Anthropology from SOAS, University of London, where she was a Felix Scholar. Shreya’s work in writing, journalism and editing has been recognised by several awards and fellowships, among them the Toto Award for Creative Writing 2019. She is working on her first book, and performing ‘Gul’ a story in text, song and dance (in collaboration with Vidhya Gopal, Shinjita Roy and Lopamudra Chatterjee.
Radhika Iyengar
(English: Nonfiction) Radhika Iyengar is an independent journalist who writes on issues that meet at the intersection of arts, culture, gender and history. She holds a Master’s degree in Journalism from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, New York. She won the Red Ink award for Excellence in Indian Journalism (Human Rights – 2018), and is a recipient of the Sanskriti Prabha Dutt Fellowship (2016-2017). Her work has been published in Al Jazeera, Huffington Post (India), Vogue (India), Open magazine, Indian Express and Scroll, among other publications. Radhika lives between Bombay and New Delhi. She is currently working on her first non-fiction book.
Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed
(English: Nonfiction) Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed is an award-winning journalist with Frontline magazine and is based in Bengaluru. He has a versatile and extensive repertoire of long-form reportage and analytical writing. Prior to becoming a journalist, Vikhar studied history at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Oxford.
Sophie Jai
(English: Fiction) Sophie Jai is a novelist in London, England. Her debut novel Wild Fires will be published in spring 2021 with HarperCollins UK. She was born and raised in Trinidad, and grew up in Toronto, Canada. She is currently the Artist in Residence at Oxford CHS and reviews fiction books for Words of Colour.
Sunanda Kadame
(Kannada: Fiction/Nonfiction)
Sunanda Kadame hails from Uttara Kannada, a coastal district of Karnataka. She is a versatile writer who has published four collections of stories, thre novels, a collection of poetry, and thre collections of essays. A recipient of the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi award, Sunanda won the Chanda Pustaka Award for her first collection of stories Putta Padada Guruthu in 2004. Her other honors include the Balavikasa Akedemi award, Besagarahalli Ramanna Katha Pustaka Bahumana, B M Shri Katha Prashasti, the D S Karki Kavya Prashasti, the Vasudeva Bhupalam Katha Prashasti, the Ratnamma Hegde Annual Award and the M K Indira Prashasti. Many of Sunanda’s stories have been translated into Konkani, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Urdu and English. Her works are also taught at the Universities of Mumbai, Bangalore and Dharwad. Sunanda has written regular columns for two major Kannada papers.
Sunanda Kadame hails from Uttara Kannada, a coastal district of Karnataka. She is a versatile writer who has published four collections of stories, thre novels, a collection of poetry, and thre collections of essays. A recipient of the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi award, Sunanda won the Chanda Pustaka Award for her first collection of stories Putta Padada Guruthu in 2004. Her other honors include the Balavikasa Akedemi award, Besagarahalli Ramanna Katha Pustaka Bahumana, B M Shri Katha Prashasti, the D S Karki Kavya Prashasti, the Vasudeva Bhupalam Katha Prashasti, the Ratnamma Hegde Annual Award and the M K Indira Prashasti. Many of Sunanda’s stories have been translated into Konkani, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Urdu and English. Her works are also taught at the Universities of Mumbai, Bangalore and Dharwad. Sunanda has written regular columns for two major Kannada papers.
Manan Kapoor
(English/Urdu: Fiction)Manan Kapoor is a writer based in New Delhi. His debut novel, The Lamentations of a Sombre Sky, was shortlisted for Sahitya Akademi’s Yuva Puruskar 2017. His writings have appeared in Boston Review , The Stockholm Review of Literature , Scroll.in , and The Wire among others. His biography of the Kashmiri-American poet, Agha Shahid Ali, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House.
Mukund Padmanabhan
(English: Nonfiction) Mukund Padmanabhan was the editor of The Hindu, and earlier, editor of Hindu Bussinessline. He is a consultant with the Hindu group and is a professor of Public Practise at KRZA University.
Aditi Rao
(English: Poetry/Nonfiction) Aditi Rao is the author of two full-length poetry collections, The Fingers Remember andA Kind Of Freedom Song, and winner of several awards and fellowships, including the Akademie Schloss Solitude fellowship, the TFA Creative Writing Award, the Sangam House Residency, the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, and the Muse India Young Writer Award. She has been teaching creative and expository writing, one-on- one as well as in group and classroom settings, since 2005. She is currently working on her first non fiction manuscript, a collection of oral histories of South Asian women who were raised by single women. Aditi lives in New Delhi and Shimla.
Priyanka Sarkar
(English: Translation/Nonfiction) Priyanka Sarkar is a translator, editor and writer. She has translated Chitra Mudgal’s novella, Giligadu, into English which was published by Niyogi Books in 2019. Her translations of short stories from Hindi to English have been published by OUP, South Asian Review and Women Unlimited. She has also done some translation work from English to Hindi and Bengali to English. As an editor, she has worked with OUP, Random House and Konark Publishers and currently freelances.
Prince Shakur
(English: Nonfiction/Fiction) Prince Shakur is a Jamaican American writer born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. His writings for Teen Vogue, Afropunk, Daily Dot, Electric Literature and more, explore social movements, mass incarceration, black/Caribbean masculinity, and queer culture. He is currently writing a non-fiction book entered on his coming of age in Obama and Trump’s America, as well as his debut fiction novel. ︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎︎