Abhay K. is a diplomat, poet and author. He is the author of ‘The Seduction of Delhi’ (Bloomsbury) and the editor of ‘CAPITALS’ (Bloomsbury). His poems have appeared in over two dozen literary journals including Poetry Salzburg Review, Asia Literary Review and have been translated into Irish, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Slovenian, Portuguese, Mandarin and Nepali. He received the SAARC Literary Award 2013. His Earth Anthem has been translated into 28 languages.
Anusha Narain is a graduate of Contemporary India at the University of Oxford.
Athira Unni is an English Literature and Sociology graduate from SUNY Buffalo, New York. She currently works with Teach for India. Her short-term stints include teaching refugee kids from Iraq, Syria, Congo, Thailand etc. in Western New York, writing for a responsible tourism firm in Pondicherry and volunteering for the cause of palliative care in Calicut.
Her poetry has been published by NAME Magazine, Generation Magazine and Brev Spread.
Barbara Harriss-White drove from Cambridge to India in 1969 to climb in the KishtwarHimal, and has been teaching and writing about India and researching its informal economy and rural development through fieldwork ever since. She is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at Oxford University and a Visiting Professor at JNU.
Her latest books include Dalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy (Three Essays); Middle India and Urban-Rural Development (Springer); Indian Capitalism in Development (Routledge); and Mapping India’s Capitalism: Old and New Regions (Palgrave).
Chintal is a sustainability consultant. She advises multinational companies, governments and NGOs in developed and emerging economies to co-create commercially viable sustainable solutions.
She was formerly Project Director for the Sustainable Ship Recycling Initiative in Bangladesh. She’s co-authored a report on Environmental and Social Risk Due Diligence in the Financial Sector: Current Approaches and Practicesfor the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the OECD.
She has a Masters in Globalization at University College of London.
Eka Love Ya is an avid archer, dosa and film buff. When he’s not searching cinema’s past for memorable content, he keeps a stern eye on the political balderdash of the times.
Goirick Brahmachari is from Silchar, Assam. ‘In the Indian Coffee House’ first appeared in 40 Under 40: An Anthology of Post-Globalisation Poetry, Edited by Nabina Das and Semeen Ali, Paperwall, Mumbai, 2016″. His debut collection of poems, ‘For the Love of Pork’ (Les Editions du Zaporogue, Denmark) won the Muse India – Satish Verma Young Writer Award for Poetry in 2016. He is also the winner of Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, 2016. His chapbook of travel notes, ‘Joining the Dots‘ has been recently published from Nivasini Publishers, Hyderabad. His poems have appeared in Berfrois, The Missing Slate, Nether, and The Four Quarters Magazine, among other magazines and journals. He co-edits The Sunflower Collective’s blog (http://sunflowercollective.blogspot.in/).
Janet Orlene is a spoken word poet, who’s been performing and conducting workshops across India. She’s also a naturalist,experiential learning facilitator and founder of InkWeaver.
Thomson Reuters Foundation is the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit news.trust.org to see more stories.
Riyaz is an avid photographer and video editor. He has edited several documentaries including ‘The Monsoon Oracle’, ‘7 Notes to Infinity’ and ‘Journey through Time’, broadcast on History Channel. He has also worked on some projects for Doordarshan.
Robin Kwong is Special Projects Editor at the Financial Times. He also writes about journalism, technology, and people at robinkwong.com, and can be found on Twitter @RobinKwong.
Roger Lee Huang is a Visiting Researcher at the Southeast Asia Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD from the Department of Asian and International Studies at City University of Hong Kong and a Masters from the London School of Economics.
Sajjad Shahid is a visiting faculty at the University of Hyderabad. A practicing civil engineer and a prolific writer. His columns and articles are regularly published in leading newspapers and journals.
He is the Secretary, Centre for Deccan Studies and Co-convenor, INTACH Hyderabad Chapter. He is presently a member of; the Academic Senate of Osmania University, the Technical Committee of the Department of Archaeology & Museums (Telangana State), the Management Committee for restoration of the QutubShahi Tombs by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, and the Osmania University Women’s College Restoration Project. He was also a member of the last Heritage Conservation Committee of Hyderabad.
Shrenik Rao, a Fellow at University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and founder of 7MB, revived and relaunched the 231-year-old news brand Madras Courier digitally on October 12, 2016.
Soumya Mishra is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford. Her research is related to Special Economic Zones (SEZs).
Srilata K. is a poet, fiction writer and translator and Professor of English at IIT Madras. Srilata has four collections of poems, ‘Bookmarking the Oasis’ (Paperwall/Poetrywala, 2015), ‘Writing Octopus’ (Authorspress, 2013), ‘Arriving Shortly’ (Writers Workshop, 2011) and ‘Seablue Child’ (Brown Critique, 2002). She also co-edited the anthology ‘The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry’. Srilata’s debut novel ‘Table for Four’, long listed in 2009 for the Man Asian literary prize, was published by Penguin. Her translation of R.Vatsala’s Tamil novel ‘Vattathul (Once there was a girl)’ was published in 2012.
Srilata is co-editor of an Indo-Irish poetry anthology ‘All the Worlds Between’ forthcoming from Yoda Press. Her academic books include ‘The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History’ (Zubaan, 2002) and ‘Short Fiction from South India’ (OUP, 2008). She was a writer-in-residence at the University of Stirling, at Sangam house and at the Yeonhui Art Space in Seoul.
Susan Ram is a writer and editor based in Southwest France. Earlier, she lived for many years in Tamil Nadu, where she worked as a teacher, journalist, writer and editor.
Sylvia Vetta is a freelance writer, whose worked for the award-winning magazines ‘The Oxford Times’ and the ‘Oxfordshire Limited Edition’. She also wrote for four magazines on art, history and science related events.
After completing her Diploma in Creative Writing from Oxford University, Sylvia wrote a novel on the ‘Stars Art Movement’ (Beijing 1979). Brushstrokes in Time is set in China against the background of real events between 1964-1993. When the Stars artists’ illegal western inspired exhibition was closed down by the police, they marched to Tiananmen Square demanding artistic freedom to be met by serried rows of white uniformed police. Sylvia interviewed in depth, over three years, the artist Qu Leilei who was one of the 5 founders of the Stars Art Movement. She has reviewed exhibitions by another Star’s artist, the Ai Weiwei at Blenheim Palace and at the Royal Academy. Brushstrokes in Time was published by Claret Press and launched in Blackwell’s Oxford in February.
Her novel ‘I Love You All, the story of Kennington (Oxford) choir told in a chorus of voices’ was published in May 2015 by Philip Hind.Her poem ‘An Artist Observes’ inspired by artist, Weimin He, is displayed on a hoarding in the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter of Oxford next to 50 pieces of his work.
Varun Ramesh is the features correspondent and sub-editor for the Madras Courier. He studied Visual Communication at St.Joseph’s College, Bangalore, filmmaking at Manipal Institute of Communication and Masters in Contemporary India at the University of Oxford.
Victor Sugbo is a poet who comes from the City of Tacloban in the Philippines. He writes poetry in English and Waray, his mother tongue. He taught as Professor of Communication and Literature at the University of the Philippines Visayas. He holds a master degree in ESL and a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of the Philippines Diliman. He has published two poetry collections in Waray and edited five books for the Philippine National Commission for Culture and the Arts. He won first prize in an international poetry competition in 1997, was National Fellow for Regional Literature of the UP Institute of Creative Writing (2003) and was awarded the GawadPambasangAlagadniBalagtas (2016), Taboan Literary Award (2013) and the EL Gouna Writers Residency in Red Sea, Egypt (2011).