Anita Agnihotri is a veteran of the Ministry of Social Justice in India, and the author of more than two dozen books, including Seventeen—winner of The Economist Crossword Book Award for translation in 2011—and Mahanadi, the story of a river that flows through some of the least developed (and poorest) regions of Chhattisgarh and Odisha. (In this issue: “Sarojbala”, translated by Arunava Sinha.)

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India (Speaking Tiger, 2018). His first collection of poetry, Ghalib's Tomb and Other Poems, was published by The London Magazine in 2013. His work also appears in the anthologies Words Matter: Writings Against Silence (Penguin, 2016) and India Dissents: 3,000 Years of Difference, Doubt and Argument (Speaking Tiger, 2017). He writes frequently for The Wire, and has contributed to The New York Times, Al-Jazeera, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, The Hindu, and other publications. (In this issue: “Vanya.”)

Priya Sarukkai Chabria, an award-winning translator, poet and writer, is acclaimed for her radical and cross-genre literary aesthetics. Her published works include speculative fiction, literary non-fiction, poetry, and a novel. Her recent books include the anthology Fafnir’s Heart: World Poetry in Translation (BombayKala, 2018) and the highly commended Clone (ubaan, 2018; University of Chicago Press, 2019). Her translation of mystical songs from Classical Tamil, Andal, won the Muse India Translation Prize. Her work is widely anthologised. She edits poetry at Sangam, and is at work on a new collection of poetry. (In this issue: “Against Censorship.”)

Rohan Chhetri is a Nepali-Indian poet based in Houston. He is the author of Slow Startle (Emerging Poets Prize 2015) and a chapbook of poems, Jurassic Desire (Per Diem Poetry Prize 2017). His second book of poems is forthcoming from Tupelo Press/HarperCollinsIN in 2021 (Kundiman Poetry Prize 2018). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, TriQuarterly, Literary Hub, and the website of the Poetry Society of America, and has been translated into French for Europe Revue and Terre à ciel. He was a 2016 Norman Mailer Poetry Fellow. (In this issue: “Restoration Elegy.”)

Mamang Dai is a poet and novelist from Itanagar. As a journalist, she was President of the Arunachal Pradesh Union of Working Journalists, and wrote extensively on culture, politics and customs of the state. She worked with the WWF in the Eastern Himalaya Biodiversity Hotspots programme, and was a member of Arunachal Pradesh Public Service Commission. Dai received the Verrier Elwin Award for her first publication, Arunachal Pradesh: The Hidden Land (2003), highlighting local folklore and traditions. She is a recipient of the Lummer Dai award (2017) granted by the Arunachal Pradesh Literary Society. Her publications include the novels The Legends of Pensam and Stupid Cupid and the verse collections River Poems and Midsummer: Survival Lyrics. In 2017 she won the Sahitya Akademi Award for her novel The Black Hill. (In this issue: “When we needed someone.”)

Zainab Priya Dala is a journalist and therapist. Her debut novel What About Meera (Penguin, 2015) won the inaugural Minara Literary Prize and was longlisted for both the Etisalat Prize and The Sunday Times Literary Award. Her follow-up, The Architecture of Loss (Pegasus/2017 and Speaking Tiger/2018) was runner-up for the Clara Johnson Prize for Women's Literature. Her stories and poetry have won prizes both in South Africa and the United States. Her memoir of life as a South African Indian woman, Being Indian in South Africa: What Gandhi Never Saw, was published by Speaking Tiger this year. She has written opinion and investigative pieces for The New York Times, The Washington Post and Scroll, while her essays have been published in newspapers and magazines worldwide. She has been an honorary Fellow in Writing at the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa, and was the project manager to secure UNESCO City of Literature Status for Durban, South Africa. She currently serves as director of The Durban Review. (In this issue: “Who Will Do for Me Now?”)

Keki Daruwalla writes poetry and fiction, and lives in Delhi. He runs a strident political column in The Tribune. He has three novels to his name, the most recent being Swerving to Solitude (Simon & Schuster). He won the 1987 Commonwealth Poetry Award for his volume Landscapes, and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984, which he returned in protest to the rising intolerance of dissent and free speech in India. (In this issue: “Runaway.”)

Samik Dasgupta is a doctoral candidate at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. His research concerns actor-training pedagogies which evolved in the post-Independence context of the three urban centres of Calcutta, Delhi and Bombay. His additional research interests include applied theatre, theatre pedagogy and comparative aesthetics, and he has published on the performativity of regional identities circumscribing club football in West Bengal. (In this issue: “The Anger of a Brahminical Playwright.”)

Uttaran Das Gupta is a journalist and poet based in New Delhi. He has published a book of poems, Visceral Metropolis, and his novel Ritual will come out later this year. (In this issue: “Cold Wave.”)

Nandini Dhar< is the author of the collection Historians of Redundant Moments (Agape Editions, 2016). Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Superstition Review, PANK, Entropy Mag, Fugue Literary Journal, New South, and elsewhere. She teaches writing and literature at OP Jindal Global University. (In this issue: “Eve's Meltdown, According To The Maid-Servant”, “Lilith Speaks About Her Sister's Reading Habits”, and “Eve Speaks of Her Childhood With Lilith.”)

Biswamit Dwibedy is the author of Ozalid (1913 Press, 2010), Eirik’s Ocean (Portable Press, 2016), Ancient Guest (HarperCollins, 2017) and Hubble Gardener (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018). In 2014, he guest-edited a dossier of contemporary Indian poetry for Aufgabe 13, published by Litmus Press. He edits Anew Print, a small press focused on translations from India. He has an MFA in writing from Bard College, and teaches in Bangalore at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology. (In this issue: “One, from Film of Dust.”)

Anjum Hasan is the author of the novels The Cosmopolitans, Lunatic in my Head, and Neti, Neti; of the short story collections A Day in the Life and Difficult Pleasures; and of the poetry collection Street on the Hill. Her books have been shortlisted for the Hindu Best Fiction Award and the Crossword Fiction Award and longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Man Asian Literary Prize. She lives in Bangalore. (In this issue: “Sisters.”)

Adil Jussawalla was born in Bombay in 1940. He is the author of four collections of poetry; his third, Trying to Say Goodbye (2011), received the Sahitya Akademi Award. He has worked as a lecturer at St. Xavier's College, Bombay, and as literary editor and columnist for several Indian magazines and newspapers. After spending most of the years between 1957 and 1970 as a student and teacher in England, he decided thereafter to remain in Bombay. He lives there now with his wife Veronik. His poems in this issue appear in his latest collection, Shorelines. (In this issue: “Announcements” and “The Days.”)

Bhanu Kapil lives in Colorado where she teaches at Naropa University and in the low-residency MFA program of Goddard College. Her full-length works include The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street, 2001), Incubation (Leon Works, 2006), Schizophrene (Nightboat, 2011), and Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2016 ). (In this issue: “Partition: A Memory” and “This Is How We Survived.”)

Suhit Kelkar's journalistic work has appeared in Indian and international publications including Al Jazeera Online, Open, and Caravan. His poetry has appeared in Domus India, Vayavya, Elsewhere Lit, Sunflower Collective, and The Bombay Literary Magazine, among others. A short story of his appeared in Firstpost. His poetry chapbook The Centaur Chronicles, published this year, deals with themes of otherness and exclusion through a character found primarily in Greek mythology. (In this issue: “The Hummingbird and I” and “New Seed.”)

Devanshu Mishra, a poet, has been thrice nominated for the TFA Award, and has been published in Indian Cultural Forum and the Hindustan Times, among other venues. (In this issue: “The Voidworm.”)

Mantra Mukim is a doctoral candidate in the English department, University of Warwick. He grew up in India. (In this issue: “Jamun”, “Semal”, and “Shahtoot.”)

Arjun Rajendran is the Poetry Editor of The Bombay Literary Magazine. He was the Charles Wallace Fellow in Creative Writing at Stirling (2008). He’s currently working on his fourth poetry collection. (In this issue: “Execution of a Deserter”, “Lunar Eclipse”, and “Coja Petrus Uscan.”)

Souradeep Roy is a poet, translator, playwright and actor from Calcutta. He is a research scholar in Theatre and Performance Studies at the School of Arts & Aesthetics in Jawaharlal Nehru University. As a journalist, he has bylines in Scroll, The Wire, Business Standard, among other places. He currently works at the Centre for Writing and Communication, Ashoka University, Sonipat. His latest work is an experiment, part-translation, part-original play-text, titled A Brief Loss of Sanity, which came out in the Bengali avant-garde little magazine, Kaurab. (In this issue: “On Janam, and what transforms.”)

Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree, a work of nonfiction; Missing: A Novel; and Out of Syllabus: Poems. Her poems and essays have appeared in Granta, Guernica, LARB, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner, Berfrois, The Common, and other journals. (In this issue: “Kanchenjunga.”)

Medha Singh is a poet, editor and translator from Delhi. She took her MA from Jawharlal Nehru University, Delhi and Sciences Po, Paris. Her debut collection Ecdysis was published in 2017 by Poetrywala/Paperwall, Mumbai. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in venues including 3:AM (London), Stag Hill (Surrey), Berfrois (London), Queen Mob's Teahouse (London), Hotel (Manchester) Coldnoon (Delhi), The Bangalore Review (Bangalore), Indian Quarterly (Delhi), Indian Cultural Forum, Sangam, and Guftugu. She has bylines in national dailies The Hindu, The Wire, Scroll, Rolling Stone and Youth Ki Awaz, among other places. She currently works as a researcher for The Raza Foundation; her second book is forthcoming. (In this issue: “Cartridge”, “Sleeplessness” and “Last Night Passed Yesterday Itself”, translated from the Hindi of Savita Singh.)

Savita Singh is a poet and political theorist. She has published three collections of poetry in Hindi, and her work in Hindi and English has been translated into languages including French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Marathi, Maithili and Odia. She is a recipient of the Raza Award, the Hindi Academy Award and the Mahadevi Verma Award for Poetry. Her earned her doctorate at McGill University, defending a thesis titled “Discourse of Modernity in India: A Hermeneutical Study.” She is the founding director of the School of Gender and Development Studies at Indira Gandhi National Open University in Delhi, where she continues to teach and conduct research in the areas of feminist theory, epistemology, and literature. (In this issue: “Cartridge”, “Sleeplessness” and “Last Night Passed Yesterday Itself”, translated from Hindi by Medha Singh.)

Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction, non-fiction and poetry into English, and from English into Bengali. His latest published book-length translation is of Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s novel, The Yogini. (In this issue: “Sarojbala”, a translation from the Bengali of Anita Agnihotria.)

Anand Thakore grew up in India and the United Kingdom. His collections include Waking In December (2001), Elephant Bathing (2012), Mughal Sequence (2012), and Selected Poems (2017). A classical vocalist by training, he has devoted much of his life to the study, performance, composition and teaching of Hindustani vocal music. He is the founder of the publishing collective Harbour Line, and of Kshitij, an interactive forum for musicians. He holds an M.A. in English Literature and is the recipient of grants from the Ministry of Human Resource Development and the Charles Wallace India Trust. His fourth poetry collection, Seven Deaths and Four Scrolls, was shortlisted for the Jayadeva National Poetry Award. He lives in Mumbai, the city in which he was born. (In this issue: “Standing Stone Saraswati, Twelfth Century, Deccan”, “Waterhole”, and “Man and Woman Gazing at the Moon.”)

Chinmaya Lal Thakur is a writer from India. He is engaged in doctoral research on David Malouf at La Trobe University, Melbourne. (In this issue: “Nostalgia for India in Melbourne.”)

Dr. Shashi Tharoor is an author and politician. He is a Member of Parliament, Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee for Information Technology, and the recipient of a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (1991). He served as Under-Secretary-General for the United Nations under Kofi Annan. His nineteen published books include The Great Indian Novel (Viking/UK and Arcade/US 1989), Show Business (Penguin/India, and Arcade/US, 1992), Riot (Viking/India and Arcade/US, 2001), Kerala: God’s Own Country (with M.F. Husain; Books Today, 2003), Inglorious Empire (Hurst/UK, and Scribe/US, 2017), and Why I Am A Hindu (Aleph Book Company/India and Scribe/US, 2018). (In this issue: “Of Hats and Glasses.”)

Annie Zaidi writes across several genres including reportage, fiction, drama, and comics. She is the author of Gulab, Love Stories #1 to 14, and Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales, and co-author of The Good Indian Girl. She has edited Unbound: 2000 Years of Indian Women's Writing, and Equal Halves. She is also the winner of The Hindu Playwright Award 2018, for Untitled 1. Her script for a radio play, Jam, was the regional (South Asia) winner for the BBC’s International Playwriting Competition. She was named the 2019 winner of the $100,000 Nine Dots Prize, a book prize created to award innovative thinking that addresses contemporary issues around the world. (In this issue: “Jhimmi.”)