Words Matter

K Satchidanandan is a bilingual poet, critic, playwright, editor, fiction writer and travel writer. A winner of 61 literary awards, he has thirty-two collections of poetry in Malayalam, ten in English, seven in Hindi, and thirty collections in no less than eight foreign languages and all major Indian languages. He also has five books in English on Indian literature, innumerable translations from world poetry and around 20 edited works. A collection of resistance writing, Words Matter edited and introduced by him, was published by Penguin Random House in 2018. Greening the Earth, an international anthology of eco-poetry edited by him is due for publication from Penguin Random House in 2023 along with The Wasteland: An Indian Response, a collection of essays from Orient BlackSwan.

Anjum Hasan is a poet, novelist, short story writer and former Books Editor of The Caravan. Her poetry collection Street on the Hill won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2006. Her novels The Cosmopolitans, Neti, Neti and Lunatic in my Head; short story collections A Day in the Life and Difficult Pleasures; and her most recent novel, History’s Angel, have received critical acclaim. Her short stories, essays and poems have appeared in publications such as Granta, Wasafiri, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Asia Literary Review.

Dadapeer Jyman, who won the 2023 TOTO Award for Creative Writing in Kannada, is a Kannada poet, writer, translator and a member of the Bangalore-based Queer Poets Collective. His short story anthology Neelakurinji won the 2022 National Sahitya Akademi Young Litterateur Prize and the 2021 Masti Venkatesh Iyengar Book Prize.

Aparna Chivukula, winner of the 2023 TOTO award for Creative Writing in English, writes, draws and makes books. She teaches writing at Mount Carmel College in Bangalore. Her poems have been published in Poetry at Sangam as part of the New Indian English Poetry issue, 2022.