Deepika Arwind
(English, Fiction/Non-Fiction/Poetry) Deepika Arwind is from Bangalore, India and writes in English. She writes poetry and short fiction and has been published in various journals and magazines. She was one of six poets shortlisted for the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize (an Indian national-level poetry award) in October 2010. She received two fellowships for journalistic and non-fiction writing this year. At Sangam House, she hopes to continue working on her short fiction.
João Anzanello Carrascoza
(Portuguese, Fiction) João was born in a small town in São Paulo state countryside, in Brazil. Carrascoza published many books of short stories and also novels for the young people and children. Carrascoza received the Jabuti (main Brazilian award for published books) and other important awards.
Rajat Chaudhuri
(English, Fiction) Rajat is a free thinker born in northern India; now practising in Calcutta. He has published one novel Amber Dusk and short stories in English and Bengali publications like The Statesman, The Telegraph, Bhashabandhan, Arambha and Times of India. His dark, surreal and twisted tales appear in Underground Voices, Notes from the Undeground, Eclectica and other snakepits of the international literary underground. Chaudhuri reviews fiction for Indian Literature and The Asian Review of Books.
Yuvan Chandrashekar
(Tamil, Poetry/Fiction) Yuvan has more than five anthologies of poems, including Otrai Ulagam ( Singular World) 1996, Vaeroru Kalam ( Another Era) 1999, Pugaichuvarukku Appaal (Beyond the Smoke-wall) 2002, Kai Maradhiyaay Vaitha Naal ( A Day that was Misplaced) 2005, Thotrap Pizhai ( Optical Error) 2009. His poems have been translated into Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Oriya and Hindi. He also writes short stories and his novels include Kulla Chithan Charithram ( Story of Kullachithan) 2002, Pagadaiyattam ( Dice Game) 2004, Kaanal Nadhi ( Illusory River) 2006, translated by Padma Narayanan and published by New Horizons Media in 2010, and Veliyetram (Stepping Out) 2009. Yuvan has translated into Tamil Peyaratra Yaathrigan ( Nameless Traveller – An Anthology of Zen Poems) 2003 and Enadhu India (Jim Corbett’s ‘My India’) 2005.
Mathilde Walter Clark
(Danish, Fiction) Mathilde is Danish-American novelist and short story writer who currently lives in Copenhagen. Her most recent book is the critically acclaimed Priapus, a portrait of a seducer.
Ida Hattemer-Higgins
(English, Fiction) Ida was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. She studied German and Chinese literature in New York City, after which she left the U.S. in 2001. In the years since, she has lived in Japan, India, and Sweden, and for the past seven years as a student of literature and translator in Berlin, Germany. Her first novel, The History of History, will appear in January 2011, with the publishing houses Alfred A. Knopf, Faber & Faber, and Flammarion.
Colie Hoffman
(English, Poetry) Colie is an American poet living in New York’s Hudson Valley. An MFA graduate of Hunter College-CUNY and a 2010 resident of Sangam House, her poems have appeared in Blood Orange Review, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, and The Furnace Review. She is working on her first book.
Sudeep KS
(English, Non-Fiction) Sudeep was born in year 1976, in Thrissur, Kerala, India. He did his masters at IIT Bombay and worked for a software company in Bangalore for some time before going back to Bombay for his doctoral research. He started writing in English during this time, and he has been active on the blog space. After completing his PhD in early 2006, he lived in Kerala, Chennai, Hyderabad, Guwahati and Delhi and came back to Kerala in 2010, where he now teaches at an engineering college (NIT Calicut). His current blog sudeep’s diary (sudeepsdiary.blogspot.com) came to existence when he was in Chennai, in August 2006. He has been writing on media, films, politics, women and caste among other things. He is one of the contributors at “Insight young voices” (blog.insightyv.com), a dalit youth magazine.
Hyuong-Su Park (Leo / Kamal)
(Korean, Fiction) Hyuong-Su has received multiple grants from the Arts Council of Korea and has taught Liguistics and Creative Writing at various universities in Korea. His publications include “Dawn of the Nana” (2010), “Fiction of Midnight” (2007) which won the Arts Council of Korea award, and “Things to Know Before Raising a Rabbit (2003).
Usha Rajagopalan
(English, Fiction/Poetry/Translation) Usha was born in Tamil Nadu, schooled in Kerala, worked in Gujarat and now settled in Karnataka. She has had an eclectic working life before switching to creative writing full time. Her books are equally varied – a writer’s manual (Get Published, OUP, 2001), novel (Amrita, Rupa & Co. 2004), short fiction (Corpse Kesavan & Other Stories, NHM, 2008) and poetry (Selected Poems of Subramania Bharati, Hachette India, forthcoming) translated from Tamil. What’s constant, so far, are the milieu of her writing – India, and the language she writes in English.
V Ramaswamy
(English, Fiction/Translation) V Ramaswamy lives in Calcutta, India. He is an entrepreneur, grassroots organiser, social planner, teacher, writer and translator. An economist by training, he has been working as a rights activist with labouring poor communities in Calcutta since 1984. The Golden Gandhi Statue from America, a collection of short stoies by the Bengali writer, Subimal Misra, translated by him was published in 2010.
Amit Ranjan
(English, Non-Fiction/Poetry/Drama) Amit is a doctoral candidate at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, in India. Currently, he is a visiting scholar at the University of New South Wales, courtesy of an Endeavour scholarship he has received from the Australian government. He is also an Inlaks Foundation Research Fellow for 2010. Amit writes poetry, fiction, and plays in English, and has acted in his own theatre productions. Currently, he is writing a fictional work set in 19th century about a very interesting Australian writer who lived in India in the 19th century.
Louise Ardenfelt Ravnild
(Danish, Translation) Louise is a Copenhagen-based translator working mainly from English into Danish. Her works include both fiction and non-fiction and range from serial killers, zookeepers’ wives, female popes and burnt-out baseball players over bakers and dieters to brain scientists and businesspeople. She holds a Master’s degree in Classical Indian Philology and hopes that it might actually prove useful some day.
Mikaela Taivassalo
(Swedish, Fiction/Drama) Mikaela writes mainly prose, but also drama. She has published two novels and a collection of short stories, and has been awarded the Runeberg Prize, a national literary award in Finland, for her novel Fem knivar hade Andrej Krapl (Andrej Krapl had Five Knives). In addition to that she has also published two children’s books, as well as stage plays and scripts for radio drama – and recently her first short film script. She is also active within The Swedish Writers’ Union of Finland. Born and lives in Finland, but writes in her mother tongue Swedish.
Anil Yadav
(Hindi, Fiction/Non-Fiction) Currently based in Lucknow, Anil is a journalist with daily newspaper The Pioneer. Anil’s literary writing has appeared in various journals and magazine. His fiction and travel writing have been featured on several websites including iharmonium, pratilipi, andkabaadkhanna.
Annie Zaidi
(English, Non-Fiction/Poetry/Drama) Annie is the author of ‘Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales’ (Non-fiction/Tranquebar 2010) and a collection of poems, ‘Crush’. Some poems have appeared in The Little Magazine, Desilit, Pratilipi, Indian Literature and Mint; some fiction was published in ‘21 Under 40’ (Zubaan), Verve, and The Raleigh Review. Her first play ‘Name, Place, Animal, Thing’ was short-listed for The Hindu MetroPlus Playwright Award, 2009. She has been a journalist for a decade and has written for several newspapers and magazines including Frontline, Tehelka, Mid-Day and Deccan Herald. She currently lives in Mumbai, India.