SMRITI RAVINDRA

Smriti Ravindra holds an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. As a Fulbright scholar, she studied women’s oral storytelling in the Terai region of her native Nepal. Her fiction and journalism have been published in the US and in India. The Woman Who Climbed Trees is her first novel. She currently resides in Mumbai.

CHARU NIVEDITA

(born 18 December 1953) is a Tamil writer based in Chennai, India. His novel Zero Degree was long-listed for the 2013 edition of the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature. Zero Degree was inducted into the prestigious ‘50 Writers, 50 Books – The Best of Indian Fiction’, published by HarperCollins. Nivedita uses postmodern themes in his writing. He was selected as one of the ‘Top Ten Indians of the Decade 2001 – 2010’ by The Economic Times. His columns appear in magazines such as Art Review Asia, The Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle. The latest addition to his literary endeavour, ‘Conversations With Aurangzeb,’ released in October 2023, is part satire and part historical fiction exploring the enigmatic persona of the controversial Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb.

SUDEEP CHAKRAVARTI

Sudeep Chakravarti is an author, historian, researcher, policy analyst, columnist, and media consultant. He is the Director of the Center for South Asian Studies (C-SAS) at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB), and an Associate Professor of South Asian Studies. He has authored of several books of non-fiction and fiction, and editor of several anthologies. His latest book is The Eastern Gate: War and Peace in Nagaland, Manipur and India’s Far East, published by Simon and Schuster in 2022.

SARAS MANICKAM

An award-winning writer, Saras Manickam’s story, ‘My Mother Pattu’ won the regional prize for Asia in the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Contest. In 2021, it was included in the anthology The Art and Craft of Asian Stories, published by Bloomsbury, and in 2022, it was published in The Best of Malaysian Short Fiction in English 2010-2020. Saras Manickam worked as a teacher, teacher-trainer, copywriter, Business English trainer, copy editor, and writer of textbooks, school workbooks and coffee-table books while writing short stories at night. Her various work experiences enabled insights into characters and life experiences, shaping the authenticity that marks her stories. She also won the 2017 DK Dutt Award for her story, ‘Charan’. Some of her other stories have appeared in Silverfish and Readings from Readings anthologies, while one was shortlisted for the 2021 Masters Review Summer Short Story Award. She lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

MALACHI EDWIN VETHAMANI

Malachi Edwin Vethamani is a Malaysian Indian poet, writer, editor, critic, bibliographer and Emeritus Professor at University of Nottingham. His latest publication is a collection of short stories, Have I Got Something To Tell You (Singapore, Penguin SEA Random House, 2024). Three of his early stories were reworked as monologues and performed as ‘Love Matters’ by Playpen Performing Arts Trust in Mumbai in 2017 and 2018. He has five collections of poems: Rambutan Kisses (2022), The Seven O’clock Tree (2022) and Love and Loss (2022), Life Happens (2017) and Complicated Lives (2016). As editor, he has edited six volumes of Malaysian poetry and short stories. The Malaysian Publishers Association awarded Malchin Testament: Malaysian Poems the National Book Award 2020 for the English Language category. ‘The Journal of Commonwealth Literature’ (2023) stated that in 2022 ‘the most prominent figure in Malaysian poetry was Malachi Edwin Vethamani, who is, without doubt, one of the leading English-language poets in Malaysia’. He is Founding Editor of Men Matters Online Journal.