Ajay Varma Alluri
Ajay Varma Alluri is a bilingual writer and translator who works with Kannada and Telugu. He holds master’s degrees in physics and comparative literature. His publications include Gagana Sindhu (poetry collection), Diāna Mara, Kalala Kannēti Pāta, Vimukthe, Nākane Ekare, Nalana Damayanti, RSS: Lōthupāthulu. He was awarded the Da Ra Bendre poetry prize, Aa Na Kru Short Story Prize, Prahalādha Agasanakatte award, Kuvempu Bhasha Bharathi award for his works. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Translation Studies at EFLU, Hyderabad.
Alladi Uma
Alladi Uma and M. Sridhar have been translating from Telugu to English, and English to Telugu for over 25 years with a focus on the issues of caste and gender. Their translations have come out from leading publishing houses such as Orient Blackswan, Sahitya Akademi, Katha, Stree/Samya, Ratna Books, and HarperCollins. For their contribution to the field of translation, they received the Rentala Memorial Award (2006) and Malathi Pramada Sahithi Puraskaram (2018).
Aruna Prasad
Aruna Prasad has MA (English), MSc (Microbiology), and B Ed degrees. She is an enthusiastic and active reader of literatures in English, Hindi, and Telugu languages. Her recent translations into Telugu include Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Russian classic The Brothers Karamzov and a collection of 100 short stories by Anton Chekhov. She currently teaches English in a high school.
J Devika
J Devika is a bilingual writer, translator, academic, and feminist historian. Her translations from Malayalam into English include the fiction of KR Meera, Unni R, and Sara Joseph, and the autobiography of Nalini Jameela. She has also translated Satish Deshpande and Nivedita Menon’s critical studies from English into Malayalam. Her own publications in both English and Malayalam focus on gender relations, politics, social reforms, and development in Kerala society. She started a pioneering website swatantryavaadini.in about first-generation Malayalee feminists. Recipient of many awards, she is currently a professor at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.
Maya Pandit
Maya Pandit is a former professor of English at the EFL University, Hyderabad. She has translated 18 books including translations into English of Marathi Dalit women’s autobiographies like Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke, Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of My Life; Marathi plays like Jayant Pawar’s The Nowhere People; polemical texts like Mahatma Phule’s Slavery; Saniya’s novelette Thereafter; and Krishnat Khot’s novel Ringaan: The Full Circle. Her translations into Marathi include Dario Fo’s An Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Awakening and Ramu Ramnathan’s Mahadevbhai. Recipient of several fellowships, she has directed “Voices from the Margins” a documentary film on Marathi Dalit Women Writers for the Sahitya Akademi. She is an ardent activist in the Marathi alternative theatre.
Nazia Akhtar
Nazia Akhtar teaches courses in Indian and Russian literatures at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad. In 2017, she was awarded a New India Foundation fellowship to write a book on Urdu prose by Hyderabadi women which was recently published as Bibi’s Room: Hyderabadi Women and Twentieth-Century Urdu Prose (2022). She has recently received a commendation from the jury of the Jawad Memorial Prize (2021) for her translation of Zeenath Sajida’s Urdu short story “Chhotam Jaan.” She is currently translating more Urdu writings of Hyderabadi women and conducting research on literary representations of the transfer of power as it affected Hyderabad.
Purnima Tammireddy
Purnima Tammireddy, a techie by profession, is a writer, translator, and publisher, primarily working in Telugu. She co-founded pustakam.net, a website for book reviews in 2009, and Elami Publications, an independent Telugu book publishing house in 2022. Her published works include a short story collection titled, Emotional Pregnancy (2022), Telugu translations of Manto’s Siya Hashiye and Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar. Her work-in-progress projects include translation of Telangana Arms Movement leader, Mallu Swarajyam’s memoir into English. She was a writer-in-residence at the Sangam House International Writer Residency in 2022.
FM Saleem
FM Saleem is a journalist, writer, and blogger. A postgraduate in Hindi and Urdu, he is currently the Bureau Chief of Hindi Milap. He writes regular columns for several Hindi and Urdu newspapers on art, culture, and literature. He also provides translation services to many institutions. His publications include Hujoom mein chehra (Urdu), Yadon ke saye baton ke ujale (Urdu), Dekhna meri ainak se (Urdu), and Surkhiyon mein log (Hindi). He has also published two translations and recently edited a special volume of the Hindi Academy’s quarterly on the Dakhni language. He received the Best Hindi Writer Award (2011), Best Blogger Award (2018), and Best Journalist Award (2022).
Sawad Hussain
Sawad Hussain translates from Arabic into English. Her work has been recognised by English PEN, the Anglo-Omani Society, and the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, among others. Her recent translations include Passage to the Plaza (2020) by Sahar Khalifeh and A Bed for the King’s Daughter (2021) by Shahla Ujayli. She is a judge for the Palestine Books Awards, and has run workshops introducing translation to students and adults under the auspices of Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, and Shubbak Festival. She is the 2022 Translator in Residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation.
Sawad Hussain appears at Anuvaad: The HLF Translation Festival with the support of the International Literature Showcase Collaboration Fund. The International Literature Showcase is a partnership between the National Centre for Writing and the British Council.
Janani Ambikapathy
Janani Ambikapathy was born and raised in Chennai. She got her PhD in English at the University of Cambridge where she worked on translations of the French-Egyptian poet Edmond Jabès. Her essays and poems have been published in Modernism/Modernity, Hopscotch Translation, Modern Poetry in Translation, Lana Turner, Datableed, The Rialto, and Visual Verse amongst others. Her pamphlet If Not Theirs is forthcoming from Veer2 in January 2023. She is currently translating the Akkananuru, an anthology of classical Tamil poems.
M. Sridhar
Alladi Uma and M. Sridhar have been translating from Telugu to English, and English to Telugu for over 25 years with a focus on the issues of caste and gender. Their translations have come out from leading publishing houses such as Orient Blackswan, Sahitya Akademi, Katha, Stree/Samya, Ratna Books, and HarperCollins. For their contribution to the field of translation, they received the Rentala Memorial Award (2006) and Malathi Pramada Sahithi Puraskaram (2018).
Zakia Mashhadi
Zakia Mashhadi is a prominent writer of fiction in Urdu and a versatile translator. Equally at ease in Urdu, English, and Hindi, she has translated several books from and into these languages. Her publications include three novels, seven short story collections, and 16 translations. Among her major translations from Urdu into English are Jeelani Bano’s Paraya Ghar (The Alien Home) and Aiwan-e-Ghazal (Aiwan-e-Ghazal); from English into Urdu, Bhabani Bhattacharya’s Shadow from Ladakh (Laddakh ka Saya) and Santosh Kumar’s The Last Salute (Aakhri Salam from the English version of his Bangla novel, Shesh Namaskar); and from Hindi into Urdu, Shiv Prasad Singh’s Neela Chand (Neela Chand). She is a recipient of the Iqbal Samman, the Sahitya Akademi translation award, and the Mirza Ghalib award.
