Yuvan Aves

Naturalist • Writer • Educator • Environmental Defender

Yuvan Aves is a writer, naturalist, educator and activist based in Chennai. He loves working with children and educators, and consults for a number of alternative educational institutions across India. He is the founder - managing trustee of Palluyir Trust for Nature Education and Research. His recent book is ‘Intertidal - A coast and marsh diary’, published by Bloomsbury. He is also the author of two books on ecology and three children's books. Yuvan is a recipient of the M. Krishnan Memorial Nature Writing Award and Sanctuary Asia Green Teacher Award, among others.

Aienla Ozukum

Editor • Publisher •

Aienla Ozukum is publishing director at Aleph Book Company. She has worked in publishing for more than ten years and with acclaimed authors such as Shashi Tharoor, Romila Thapar, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, N Ram, G N Devy, B N Goswamy, Upinder Singh, and Meena Arora Nayak. She holds an MA in English Literature from Delhi University and a Graduate Diploma in Publishing from the National Book Trust, India.

A J Thomas

Poet • Editor • Translator •

A J Thomas is an Indian English poet, editor, and translator with more than 20 books to his credit. He has translated works of illustrious Malayalam writers like O N V Kurup, Paul Zacharia and M Mukundan and edited books by U R Anantha Murthy. He served as the editor of the Sahitya Akademi’s journal ‘Indian Literature’ and co-edited the ‘Best of Indian Literature’. He is a recipient of Katha Award, AKMG Prize and Vodafone Crossword Award (2007). He holds a Senior Fellowship from the Department of Culture, Government of India and was an Honorary Fellow, Department of Culture, Government of South Korea. He was a Guest Speaker in several writers’ conferences and readings in South Korea, Australia, Thailand, Hong Kong and Nepal. He has recently edited ‘The Greatest Malayalam Stories Ever Told’, an anthology of 50 short stories, sourced from modern classics of Kerala.

Amandeep Sandhu

Author • Writer •

Amandeep Sandhu, born in Rourkela, Odisha, and educated at the University of Hyderabad, resides in Bangalore. He authored the novels 'Sepia Leaves' (2008), exploring a family's struggle with schizophrenia during the Emergency, and 'Roll of Honour' (2012), nominated for The Hindu Prize 2013, about a Sikh boy's divided loyalties during the Khalistan movement of 1984. In 2019, Sandhu published 'PANJAB Journeys Through Fault Lines' (Westland/Amazon), a work combining reportage, memoir, and historical context, long-listed for the NIF-Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Award 2020 and short-listed for the Atta Galatta-BLF Non Fiction Prize 2020, now republished by Penguin Random House. His other works include the e-Book 'Bravado to Fear to Abandonment: Mental Health and COVID-19 Lockdown' and contributions to various anthologies, magazines, and websites like Caravan, Scroll, and The Hindu. Sandhu was a Fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2013-15) and is currently a Homi Bhabha Fellow (2022-24), working on a book tentatively titled 'The Outliers: Sikhs who live Outside Panjab, in India'.

Charu Nivedita

Author • Writer •

Charu Nivedita is the author of nearly hundred works in Tamil, ranging from collections of essays to novels, anthologies of poetry to short stories - Marginal Man, To Byzantium: A Turkey Travelogue, Unfaithfully Yours, Morgue Keeper and Towards a Third Cinema. He experiments with writing forms and satirises his early struggles and foray into writing in his auto-fiction novels. These have been critically acclaimed and translated into different languages. His most popular work, Zero Degree, has been included in university syllabi across the globe and some of his other works have been part of prestigious curations. ‘Conversations with Aurangazeb: A Novel’ is the latest translation of his work which won a grant at the inaugural PEN Presents translation competition.

Dev Kamatad

Spinning Practitioner • Theatre Practitioner •

Dev B Kamatad is a theatre practitioner (ರಂಗಾಭ್ಯಾಸಿ) with 7 years of experience in a variety of roles and also has a keen interest in filmmaking and photography. He has deep interest in terrace gardening and is currently a freelancer with Krishnakumar of Quantum Leap Guru. At Sumana Sangama, Dharwad, Dev began his journey in natural farming and Charakha spinning to make yarn to weave Khadi fabric. His passionate approach towards spinning is a core part of the Charakha workshops at tvami.

Divya Ravindranath

Academic • Senior Researcher •

Divya Ravindranath is Senior Researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore. Her work is at the intersection of labour, gender and urban health. She is the co-founder of Cities in Fiction - an archival project that seeks to locate real-world and imaginary places in literature.

Heta Pandit

Researcher • Activist • Author

Heta Pandit is an independent researcher, activist and author of eleven books on Goan heritage and its art and culture. She is a Homi Bhabha fellow and co-founder of the Goa Heritage Action Group. Some of her books are Houses of Goa, Hidden Hands: Master Builders of Goa, Grinding Stories: Songs from Goa, and her recent work is ‘Stories from Goan Houses’.

Jeevan Xavier

Entrepreneur • Designer • Artist

Jeevan Xavier is an entrepreneur, designer, and artist based in Bangalore. They are a self-taught and multidisciplinary artist whose subject matter is personal, stemming from encounters with social conflicts. Jeevan takes these conflicts back to the people as pieces of work to trigger conversations. Intrigued by contradictions in behaviour and the dynamics of human interaction, they find inspiration for their practice of Art and Design. Their artistic practice is a means of connecting with society at large. With interests in people and folklore, Jeevan's work reflects their two passions, intertwined with their extensive industrial experience. Currently, Jeevan manages a Textile - Design - Art - Research studio in Bangalore, JLX Studio. Under this eponymous brand, the studio engages in documentation and research in areas of folklore and vernacular culture in Southern India, alongside commercial design projects.

K J Satchidananda

Spinning Practitioner • Art Facilitator •

K J Satchidananda, fondly known as Sacchu, successfully ran an advertising agency before working as art facilitator at TVS School, Mysore and developing sustainable life skills of children. Introduced to yarn spinning by a close friend, he understood its vast scope, and designed and developed a refined charaka to suit the current generation and fast-paced life. Further, he began his journey towards slow fashion through his idea of providing livelihood for handloom weavers and making spinners self-reliant for their requirement of clothing. He also conducts yarn spinning workshops and aims to create urban spinning clubs.

Karthik Venkatesh

• Editor • Author •

Karthik Venkatesh is an Executive Editor with Penguin Random House India where he commissions and edits fiction and nonfiction. He is also a writer and his articles have been featured in several publications like The Hindu, Mint Lounge, Deccan Herald, The Federal and several other publications. His first book entitled '10 Indian Languages and How They Came to Be', meant for young adults, was published by Duckbill (an imprint of Penguin Random House) in February 2024.

Kiran Manral

Author • Writer •

Author Kiran Manral is also a speaker and mentor. She has written in different formats including columns for Times of India, Scroll, The Telegraph and Cosmopolitan, short stories for anthologies such as Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Best Asian Speculative Fiction and City of Screams. Her novels traverse various genres from horror - The Face at the Window and More Things in Heaven and Earth, psychological thriller - Missing, Presumed Dead, non-fiction - Karmic Kids and 13 Steps to Bloody Good Parenting and detective fiction - Reluctant Detective and The Kitty Party Murder. She is also a multiple awardee having won the Women Achievers Award by Young Environmentalists Association and the International Women’s Day Award 2018 from the Indian Council for UN Relations (supported by the Ministry of Women and Child Welfare, Government of India), among others.

Lubna Duggal

Crocheter • Editor •

Lubna Duggal is a committed crocheter, who strays into knitting hoodies for her niblings now and then. She was introduced to the fibre arts by her grandmother through knitting, but she soon left it behind as she discovered and taught herself crochet, her true love. While her default mode of crochet is Amigurumi, interspersed with periods of obsessive i-cord making, she has more recently come to appreciate the versatility of the granny square and its many variations. She looks to the future with a budding interest in learning how to spin her own yarn. Lubna is also an editor by profession. She is Consultant with the Word Lab at Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru and Associate Editor at Urbanisation, the biannual IIHS journal.

Manish Dubey

Chief - IIHS Practice • Author •

Manish Dubey is Chief, Practice Programme, at IIHS. Manish provides strategic direction and guidance to consolidate and grow the programme portfolio and team in line with the overall mission and strategic vision of IIHS. Manish’s engagement with public issues through media commentary has translated to the publishing of over a hundred opinion pieces and articles on politics, society and cricket in digital and print. He has also authored two books of crime fiction and has spoken on literary matters and his personal creative journey on several fora.

Meeti Shroff-Shah

Author • Writer •

After her award-winning career in advertising, Meeti Shroff-Shah ventured into writing full time with articles in India Today, The Mint and Conde Nast Traveller. Her first book was the well-received memoir, ‘Do You Know Any Good Boys?’. Her successive books were critically acclaimed - ‘A Mumbai Murder Mystery’ made it to longlist of CWA New Blood Dagger Award 2022, and ‘The Death of Kirti Kadakia’ was a part of the 2023 Times of India AutHer Awards shortlist.

Michelle Bambawale

Author • Writer •

Michelle Bambawale spent her childhood in a Goan Catholic family in Pune, India. Since then, she has lived in three places in India and in three countries around the world raising her own nomadic family. Over the years, she has contributed to numerous publications in India and UAE. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Michelle moved to her ancestral home in Siolim in North Goa, which inspired her debut book, ‘Becoming Goan’. It is a contemporary coming home story, published by Penguin Random House in December 2023, and describes the road to her roots in her provocative, tongue- in-cheek style.

Minakshi Prabhu

Spinning Practitioner • Owner - Tvami •

Minakshi Prabhu was a part of the corporate world and was also a part of the establishing Atyati Technologies that works in financial inclusion. She quit that world and started experimenting in sustainable living after the birth of her children. She currently runs a handicraft store ‘tvami’, which works with artisans and helps them get a justifiable price for their work. Introduced to spinning by K J Satchidananda, she practises the skill and conducts Charakha workshops at her store.

Pallavi Narayan

Academic • Author • Editor •

Pallavi Narayan is an academic, author and editor. She has worked at the publishing houses of Penguin Random House, Pan Macmillan and Routledge and was a Fellow at various international institutions. She has authored Pamuk's Istanbul: The Self and the City (2022) and co-edited Singapore at Home: Life across Lines (2021). She established and heads the Ahmedabad Writing Programme and University Press at Ahmedabad University where she currently works as an Associate Professor of Practice, School of Arts and Sciences.

Pooja Sagar

Pooja Sagar leads the Word Lab and the Library teams at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru. She is a bilingual writer with interests in non fiction, personal essays and translation spread across academic and non academic spaces. Her current work is on the history of medicine in India, and autobiographies of doctors and vaidyans in Malayalam.

Pooja Saxena

Typeface Designer • Graphic Designer •

An award-winning typeface and graphic designer, Pooja Saxena divides her time between being a team member at international type foundry TypeTogether, and her own independent practice, Matra Type. Her work focuses on design in and for Indic scripts, notably Devanagari, and studying typographic visual languages that emerge in India. She is a devoted collector of ephemera and a chronicler of street lettering.

Preeti Zachariah

Journalist • Writer •

Preeti works as an assistant editor with The Hindu’s digital team and writes across topics, including sustainability, culture, art, society, books, science, health, wildlife, and heritage.

Rakesh Khanna

Author • Publisher •

Rakesh Khanna grew up in Berkeley, California, of mixed Punjabi and Anglo-American heritage. He co-founded Blaft Publications in Chennai with his wife, Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, in 2008. The company publishes translations of Indian fiction, folklore, weird fiction, and graphic novels. Rakesh is the author of Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India and editor of Blaft's Tamil Pulp Fiction and forthcoming Gujarati Pulp Fiction anthologies. Sometimes he edits mathematics textbooks. He is interested in marine invertebrates, demonology, topological graph theory, and banging on things to see what they sound like.

S S Harihara

Communications Consultant • Community Builder •

Harihara S S or ‘Hari’ is the Communications and Outreach Consultant at The Heritage Network with historian Heta Pandit, and also the Events and Community Facilitator at Champaca Books’ new store in Goa. His roles in the past—as Artist Manager, Events Producer, Social Entrepreneur—have all been endeavours in community building around heritage, history, the arts, and culture.

Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari

Author • Writer •

Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari lives in a small town called Areekode, near Calicut, Kerala. He completed his BA from Aligarh Muslim University and MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Chronicle of an Hour and a Half is his first novel.

Shrabonti Bagchi

• Journalist • Writer •

Shrabonti Bagchi is National Features Editors at Mint, writing primarily for its weekend publication Mint Lounge, a magazine of art, culture and lifestyle.

Shwetha Srikanthan

Editor • Writer • Podcaster

Shwetha Srikanthan is an assistant editor at Himal Southasian, a regional magazine of politics and culture. She writes the monthly Southasia Review of Books newsletter and hosts the Southasia Review of Books podcast for Himal. She is currently based in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Suresh Jayaram

Artist • Art Historian • Curator

Suresh Jayaram is an artist, art historian, arts administrator, and curator from Bangalore. He is the Founder and Director of Visual Art Collective/1.Shanthiroad Studio, an international artist's residency and alternative art space in Bangalore. He is involved in art practice, urban mapping, archiving, curation, and arts education. His keen interest in environmental and urban developmental issues influences his work. Jayaram has worked on the horticultural history of Mysore state and Bangalore city. He edited a book titled "Whatever he Touched he adorned" (2010) on G.H. Krumbiegel and authored "Bangalore's Lalbagh - A Chronicle of the Garden and the City" in 2021, which was awarded by Heritage Beku for Heritage Literature in 2023. He also wrote a regular column on art and culture, "What you see when you see," for Bangalore Mirror. Currently, he is working on a book about Cubbon Park. When not walking in the city's parks and creating curated experiences to enjoy nature and culture, he often visually indulges in working as a multimedia artist with Nature in an urban context.

Tarun K Saint

Scholar • Writer •

Tarun K Saint, an independent Indian scholar born in Kenya, has interests in Partition literature, science fiction, and detective fiction. His works include authoring Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction (2020), editing Bruised Memories (2002), and co-editing anthologies like Translating Partition (2001), Looking Back: India's Partition, 70 Years On (2017), The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction (2019, 2021), Avatar (2020), Kalicalypse (2022), Ecoceanic: Global South SF (2024), and the two-volume Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction (2024).

Vikram Sridhar

Curator Performance Storyteller • Theatre Practitioner

Vikram Sridhar is a Performance Storyteller, Theatre Practitioner, and Narrative-based Facilitator. His stories, performances, and workshops for children, students, adults, and families are rooted in heritage, ecology, and folklore, deeply inspired by various communities of the soil. Based in Chennai and Bangalore, he travels extensively across the country with his Desi way of storytelling.