Biographies
Tuhin Bhowal is a writer, translator, and editor working between three languages: Hindi, Bengali, and English. Recipient of the Deepankar Khiwani Memorial Poetry Prize 2022 and twice longlisted for the TOTO Awards for English Poetry, his poems, translations, and literary criticism appear or are forthcoming in New Verse Review, Ballast Journal, Redivider, Indian Literature, Poetry at Sangam, and elsewhere. As an editor and co-translator, Perennial: The Red River Book of 21st-century Hindi Poetry—the debut book to his credit—was published in August 2025. The anthology aims to bring postmodern Hindi poetry in translation by 40 poets and 26 translators spanning seven decades. A former Translation Mentee with the South Asian Literature in Translation (SALT)—mentored by Daisy Rockwell, Arunava Sinha, and Daniel Hahn—he’s also a Translation Fellow at the South Asia Speaks (SAS) Mentorship Programme, Class of 2025—working on a novel under the mentorship of Srinath Perur. Having begun working on his debut collection of poems, tentatively titled Beneath The Body, The Body Above, he curates Risking Delight, a series of close-reading poetry sessions. Mokshaland & Other Poems, by Sudhir Ranjan Singh, a poetry chapbook in translation, is forthcoming from Red River.
Chandrika Das is a translator and scholar whose work explores the intersections of literature, orality, and performance. Her research examines the intersemiotic translation of Rajasthan’s phad-vachana performances, focusing on how oral narratives transform into visual form through the painted scroll and how performance in turn reanimates image and story. A Fulbright scholar at The University of Texas at Austin (2023–24), she has been an Associate Fellow at the NIDA School of Translation Studies in Italy and has also trained at the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. Her English translation of Omprakash Valmiki’s short story “Sapna” (Dream) was published by the Sahitya Akademi in its journal Indian Literature. She is currently translating Murdahiya by Dr. Tulsi Ram, her first full-length book translation, which engages deeply with caste, memory, and belonging. Chandrika’s work engages with vernacular aesthetics and the ethics of representing oral and performative forms in translation. Drawing on her translations of contemporary Hindi texts, she reflects on how the rhythms, expressions, and material qualities of writing shaped by lived experience can be carried into new linguistic and cultural contexts without losing their immediacy or intimacy.
Sayari Debnath is a culture journalist at Scroll, where she writes about books, art, and literary trends. She translates from Bengali and Hindi to English. She is the winner of the 2025 Rabindranath Tagore Award for Translation, and was shortlisted for the 2025 Valley of Words Book Awards for English Translation and the 2024 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation, and longlisted for the 2025 Crossword Book Awards (Translation). Her debut work of translation was published in 2024, and two more books have been published since then. A collection of translated short stories and a novel are forthcoming before the end of the year.
Trisha Gupta is an independent writer, translator and editor. Since 2007, her reportage and critical analyses of films, literature and the arts have appeared in a range of reputed English-language publications in India, including the Indian Express, Mumbai Mirror, Biblio, Scroll.in, The Wire, India Today, Frontline and The Caravan. From 2021 to 2024, she was a Professor of Practice at OP Jindal Global University’s school of journalism and communication. Her first book – a selection of poems by Kedarnath Singh translated by her from the Hindi – is currently on submission. She is working on her first nonfiction book and a second literary translation project.
Vighnesh Hampapura studied literature, creative writing, and translation at Ashoka University and Oxford, where he was supported by a Rhodes Scholarship. He practises Karnatik music and is currently a visiting faculty in the Performing Arts programme at Ashoka University. His work has appeared in the Books & Ideas section of Scroll.in, Literary Activism, L’Indiscreto, Bhanuprabha, and the Women’s Studies Journal. His translation of Vivek Shanbhag’s novel On One Side, The Sea and a collection of short stories by Vasudhendra are underway.
Jayasree Kalathil is a bilingual writer and translator working with Malayalam and English. She is the author of The Sackclothman, a children’s book that has been translated into Malayalam, Telugu and Hindi. Her translations have twice won the Crossword Book Jury Award for Translation (Diary of a Malayali Madman by N. Prabhakaran in 2019 and Maria, Just Maria by Sandhya Mary in 2024), the 2020 JCB Prize for Literature (Moustache by S. Hareesh), the 2023 V. Abdulla Memorial Translation Award (Valli by Sheela Tomy), and the 2024 Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award (Maria, Just Maria). Valli was also shortlisted for the 2023 ALTA National Translation Award for Prose. As part of the global effort #readpalestine, Jayasree has translated into Malayalam works by Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish, Refaat Alareer, Hiba Abu Nada, Samih al-Qasim, and Mosab Abu Toha. She is also the managing editor for translation fiction at the Bombay Literary Magazine. Originally from Malappuram district in Kerala, India, Jayasree lives in the New Forest in Hampshire, UK.
Manav Kambli is a translator, writer, and editor from Pune whose work brings Marathi literature into new resonance with contemporary English readerships. A graduate of FLAME University (Literary and Cultural Studies), he approaches translation as both artistic interpretation and cultural inquiry. His translation of Baburao Bagul’s Lootaloot (Hachette, 2024) drew praise for its precision and emotional range, while ongoing translations of Hamid Dalwai and Jayant Pawar build on his interest in how language refracts questions of justice, power, and identity. Manav was a 2023 Sangam House Fellow, where he further honed his craft as a literary translator. His essays and translations have appeared in Economic & Political Weekly, Andolan, Helter-Skelter and LILA Inter-actions, reflecting his engagement with cultural discourse and translation as a political act. Beyond literature, Manav is a Content Strategist at Elephant Design. He has previously curated dialogues with UNDP, UN Women, and Facebook India under Josh Talks, bringing together voices that interrogate social structures and creative economies. Currently, Manav wishes to explore the rich spectrum Marathi literature has to offer and contribute to the effort of bringing it before a larger, more varied audience.
Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal is a writer and literary translator, born in Palampur, India. She studied at St. Bede’s College, Shimla; Trinity College, Dublin; and Queen’s University, Belfast. Her poems have been translated into Arabic, German, Italian; and have appeared in Ambit, Bad Lilies, Banshee, Cyphers, Gutter, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Jukebox, Poetry London, Rattle, The Irish Times, and elsewhere. In 2018, she was selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series. Supriya was the 2021 Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent. She was awarded the fellowship to develop a series of poems tethered to the life and work of Norah Richards, the Irish theatre practitioner who called the erstwhile Punjab and the Dhauladhars her home. She is the author of The Yak Dilemma, published by Makina Books. Supriya is currently based in Manchester, where she is working towards a practice-based PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Centre for Place Writing. Her research explores reservoirs as engineered ecologies shaped by memories of displacement, control, and transformation.
Mehdi Khawaja is a writer and translator based in Srinagar, Kashmir. He is the winner of Armory Square Prize for Translation 2025. Mehdi divides his time between writing/translating and working with traditional Kashmiri crafts.
Ayesha Latif is a literary translator and a scholar of Punjabi pre-modern poetry. Her PhD dissertation is a study of the lived history of the common people embedded within the works of poet-mystics Shah Hussain and Bulleh Shah. With her personal commitment to translating historical and marginalized works, she is currently working on the poetry of the little-known nineteenth-century Punjabi poetess, Piro Preman. In her translations, while aiming to highlight radicality and resistance, she also attempts to capture the emotive and poetic quality manifested in the rhythm of Punjabi literary traditions. In addition to her academic work, she contributes folk culture essays and book reviews to publications like Dawn News.
Rohit Manchanda has written three novels, each, gratifyingly, the winner of an award. A Speck of Coal Dust won a Betty Trask Award and was republished in 2024; A Place in Mind (as yet unpublished), won a Tibor Jones South Asia Prize; the third, The Enclave, published together with A Speck of Coal Dust by HarperCollins India, won the Kalinga LitFest Award for Fiction 2025. Rohit grew up in the coalfields of Jharkhand and did his doctorate from the University of Oxford. He is a professor at IIT Bombay where he teaches and researches computational neurophysiology and, in a parallel world, writes fiction and non-fiction. He has also written Monastery, Sanctuary, Laboratory – 50 years of IIT-Bombay, a narrative history of the Institute. Rohit’s teaching has won him several awards, including awards for excellence at IIT Bombay and a national-level award from the Indian National Science Academy. He has co-edited a research monograph, Urinary Bladder Physiology: Computational Studies (2024).
Alexander McKinley is an instructor in the Department of Theology at Loyola University Chicago. He researches the religious traditions of Sri Lanka and has been a translator of Sinhala and Tamil poetry for over a decade. He is the author of Mountain at a Center of the World: Pilgrimage and Pluralism in Sri Lanka (Columbia University Press, 2024).
Chandrakant Kaluram Mhatre is a professional translator and independent scholar of Marathi Bhakti literature. A native of Navi Mumbai, he is a proud speaker of his mother tongue, Marathi and has taught English language and literature in a number of schools and colleges for 18 years. So far, he has translated the poems of three Marathi saint-poets into English, published as: One Hundred Poems of Tukaram, One Hundred Poems of Chokha Mela and The Autobiography of Sant Bahinabai. Out of these, One Hundred Poems of Chokha Mela is included as a prescribed text in the syllabus of Mumbai University’s MA (Honours) in English programme from June 2022. He is also the Founder-President of Sitaram Mhatre Foundation, a non-profit based in Navi Mumbai, which has undertaken the unicodification of Marathi Bhakti poetry in order to build text corpora to facilitate its quantitative linguistic study.
Zain R. Mian is a professor and literary translator based in Toronto. He is currently working on a translation of Syed Imtiaz Ali Taj’s Anarkali and a scholarly book on the geographic imagination in Urdu literature. Zain’s scholarly work has been published in The Journal of World Literature and The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures. Anarkali is his first book-length translation.
Chaiti Mitra is an academic by profession and translator by passion. She has been teaching English literature at the undergraduate and post graduate levels for over three decades, and also moves fluidly between English and Bengali, translating in both directions. Among the few translators to take on two of contemporary Bengali literature’s most intricate voices, Shyamal Gangopadhyay and Tilottama Majumdar, she has rendered their complex and layered prose into English with nuance and empathy. Her recent translation, Chandaneswar Junction and Other Stories (The Antonym Collection), has been widely appreciated. She has also recently contributed to a forthcoming volume of Bengali rendering of Doris Lessing’s short fiction. Her Bengali translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet has been running successfully with the Kolkata-based theatre group Swapnasandhani since 2022. Her research interests include women’s writings, and narratives of trauma and resistance. Her first critical work, Boudoir to Bibighar: The Memsahib and the 1857 Mutiny Narratives, explores intersections of gender, empire, and representation. Beyond academia, she writes regularly on gender and travel for Bengali journals and newspapers. An avid traveler and a music and theatre enthusiast, she attempts to bridge languages, cultures, and creative forms through her work.
Dr Pratixa Parekh is a translator and an academician with around twenty years of teaching experience. She has been working as an Assistant Professor of English at Dolat-Usha Institute of Applied Sciences and Dhiru-Sarla Institute of Management & Commerce, Valsad, Gujarat since 2006. She is a translator translating fiction and poetry from Gujarati into English, many of which have been published in many outlets including Indian Literature, Sahityasetu, Translation Today, Sahitya. One of her translated short stories has been included in an anthology titled Redolent Rush: Contemporary Indian Short Fiction in Translation published by Hawakal Publishers, Kolkata. Her research interests are in the fields of Comparative Studies, Translation Studies and Gender Studies with special interest in folk and tribal literature of the state of Gujarat.
Vilasini Ramani is a translator and an independent filmmaker. She was awarded the 2024 New India Foundation Translation Fellowship towards translating a book of M. Singaravelar, the first communist from South India. She was the editor and publisher of Pragnai from 2014 to 2020. She has translated four books from English to Tamil and has published articles on cinema and culture.
Uma Shirodkar is a translator, writer, and Translations Editor (Fiction) at The Bombay Literary Magazine. She was a 2022 South Asia Speaks fellow, and also earned a Jury Special Mention for the 2024 Mozhi Translation Prize. She translates between Marathi and English, occasionally dabbling in Gujarati as well. Her translations have been published in Guernica Magazine, Hakara Journal, and Gulmohar Quarterly.
Aditya Vikram Shrivastava is a writer, translator, and scholar from Lucknow, India. They teach undergraduate students writing and critical thinking at Ashoka University, working with themes of return, repetition, and haunting. Spanning several media, their work is tied together by a keen interest in questions of language, orality, regional histories, translation, (post)colonial encounters, and archives of sexuality. Their poems and essays have been published by The Tribune, The British Council, Goethe-Institut, Literary Activism, and Usawa Lit Mag, among others. At the Ashoka Centre for Translation, they spent a year building an expansive archive of books translated from various Indian languages over the last two centuries. Shortlisted for the ASV Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation 2024, their sample translation of Mridula Garg’s novel Miljul Mann has also been published by Words Without Borders. A recipient of the 2024 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship for Hindi, they are currently translating a collection of Hindi short stories exploring violence, democracy, faith, and justice.
Rahul Soni is a writer, editor and translator. He is currently Editor-at-Large at HarperCollins India, where over the past few years he has published several award-winning books by authors both established and new. He has previously been associated with the literary agency Writer’s Side, the writer’s residency Sangam House, the international journal of translation Asymptote, and Almost Island, a journal of avant-garde writing. He was also co-founder of the pioneering multilingual literary journal Pratilipi, and its publishing imprint Pratilipi Books. His translations include Shrikant Verma’s Sahitya Akademi Award–winning poetry collection Magadh (Westland India, 2023 / And Other Stories, 2025 / Liveright, 2026), International Booker Prize–winner Geetanjali Shree’s novel The Roof Beneath Their Feet (Penguin India, 2023 / And Other Stories, 2026), Pankaj Kapur’s novella Dopehri, a selection of Ashok Vajpeyi’s poetry A Name for Every Leaf, and Anurag Minus Verma’s picture book for children Moon Pizza. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, The Poetry Review, TLS, Asymptote and Indian Literature, among others.
Sonakshi Srivastava is a senior writing fellow at Ashoka University, the translations editor at Usawa Literary Review, and an educational arm assistant at Asymptote. Her words may be found at Scroll, Asymptote, The Alipore Post, Moveable Type, ASAP/Art, The Bilingual Window, Potluck Zine, Hakara. A former translation fellow with the South Asia Speaks programme, and a Tempus Public Foundation fellow, she is passionate about all forms of creative writing, and reading pedagogies.
D V Subhashri is a multilingual writer and translator based in Bangalore, India. Her stories and translations have appeared on various online platforms. She has published Bayyam, a Telugu children’s picture book that won the 2018 TANA-Manchi Pustakam contest, and That’s a Fire Ant Right There, an English translation of Mohammed Khadeer Babu’s auto-fiction stories (Speaking Tiger Books, 2025). Forthcoming is a Telugu translation of Dadapeer Jyman’s Kannada short stories (Teru, Itara Kathalu from Elami Publications), two award-winning children’s books from Children’s Book Trust, New Delhi and an English translation of Khadeer Babu’s short story collection on urban women from Speaking Tiger Books. Prior to becoming a literary translator, Subhashri worked for over a decade as a freelance language service provider from German and Indian languages.
AJ Thomas is an Indian English poet, fiction-writer, editor, and translator with more than 20 books. He was Editor of Indian Literature, the bi-monthly English Journal of Sahitya Akademi, (The National Academi of Letters, India) for nearly two decades. Taught English in Benghazi University, Libya from 2008 to 2014. He was also a Senior Consultant at Indira Gandhi National Open University, Delhi. He is the recipient of Katha Award, AKMG Prize (which enabled him to tour USA, UK and Europe in 1997), Vodafone Crossword Award (2007), V Abdulla Memorial Translation Award 2025, the 1st UNESCO Literature City-CALICUT Award 2025. His latest work, The Greatest Malayalam Stories Ever Told (2023), remains on the best-seller list even after two years now, and was short-listed for the Crossword Award 2024. His translation of N Mohanan’s novel Orikkal-Once, which had become chart-topper in Malayalam last year, was published in May 2025.
Srividhya Venkatesan is a literary translator working between the language pairs English and Tamil. She graduated from Ahmedabad University with a PG Diploma in Literary Translation and was a South Asia Speaks fellow in 2024, part of the translation cohort. Her translation journey began while she was working on children’s short stories during the pandemic, and since then, she has been actively involved with various organisations, translating company policies and climate change documents. Her recent work includes a book-length translation from English to Tamil, scheduled for publication in January 2026.
