Class of 2022
Class of 2022
Meet the Class of 2022
Sowmiya Ashok
Sowmiya Ashok is a journalist, writer and Chinese language student in Chennai, India. She has worked as a political and environment correspondent for The Hindu and The Indian Express in Delhi, and reported from India, the United States, and China.
Sowmiya is working with mentor Mujib Mashal on a book about archaeological excavations in Southern India.
Duaa Amir
Duaa Amir is an undergraduate student of medicine in Karachi, Pakistan.
She is working with mentor Sonia Faleiro on an exploration of feminism told through real life experiences.
Anmol Arora
Anmol Arora is an independent journalist and writer in Rajasthan, India. They report on gender and sexuality, food and culture, health and wellness.
Anmol will work with mentor Samar Halarnkar on a series of reported pieces on the food, culture, and lifestyle of their home state.
Sanskrita Bharadwaj
Sanskrita Bharadwaj is an independent journalist based in the northeast Indian state of Assam. Her work appears in Slate, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera, Atlas Obscura, Article 14, and The Caravan.
Sanskrita will work with mentor Marc Herman on a series of articles from Assam.
Bijayalaxmi Biswal
Bijayalaxmi Biswal is a doctor and public health researcher studying on a Commonwealth Scholarship at The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Kings' College London.
She is working with mentor Isaac Chotiner on a project that explores the impact of mining on Orissa’s indigenous communities.
Urbi Chatterjee
Urbi Chatterjee is a student of History and Psychology and a Young India Fellow. She lives in Delhi, India and works as an independent writer and editor. She also teaches communicative English to adults.
Urbi is working with mentor Arunava Sinha on a translation of Leela Majumdar's Bengali anthology Kheror Khata.
Sharanya Deepak
Sharanya Deepak is a writer and reporter from New Delhi, India. She writes about food, language, and the commodification of culture. Her writing appears in VICE, Eater, Vittles London, Atlas Obscura, Wasafiri, Longreads, Roads and Kingdoms, FiftyTwo, and The Baffler.
Sharanya is working with mentor Sanam Maher on a collection of essays.
Photo: Sumit Roy
Dixita Deka
Dixita Deka is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in a Swedish Academy of Sciences funded project at the North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati. She has a PhD in Social Sciences from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and is the recipient of numerous awards including the VMMF-IAWS Young Research Scholars Award 2020. Her writing appears in Zubaan, Asian Ethnicity, Economic & Political Weekly, Raiot, Seminar, and The India Forum.
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Dixita is working with mentor Samanth Subramanian on a book about the underground lives of Assam's women insurgents.
Riddhi Dastidar
Riddhi Dastidar is a writer and reporter in Delhi working on gender, disability, environment and rights, with work in Foreign Policy Magazine, Himal Southasian, The Baffler, IndiaSpend, and Scroll.in. They were shortlisted for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and Wasafiri New Writing Prize for fiction, and won the 2020 TFA Award for Creative Writing for poetry.
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Riddhi is working with mentor Deepa Anappara on their novel-in-stories, First The Crows.
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(Photo: Sambit Dattachaudhuri)
Suresh Gaikwad
Suresh Gaikwad is a PhD fellow at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His PhD project focuses on the role of caste within the British-Indian military from the Sepoy Mutiny to the Second World War (1857-1945). His works appears in Nether Quarterly, The People's Post, Andolan and Shikshak Sanghatak. He lives in New Delhi, India.
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Suresh is working with mentor Mahesh Rao on a novel, Berki: Untouchable Rebels, set during the Namantar Andolan.
Suchismita Ghosh
Suchismita Ghosh is a PhD scholar at the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University. She is also a freelance translator and copy-editor. Her Bengali translation of Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others will be published in 2022.
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Suchismita is working with mentor Arunava Sinha on a translation of Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s novel, My Father’s Garden, from English to Bengali.
Mehak Jamal
Mehak Jamal is a film maker from Srinagar, Kashmir. She has co-written the feature film Love Hostel and writes web-series for Disney Plus Hotstar & Zee5. Mehak has been a Screenwriting Fellow for Film Independent’s Global Media Maker’s Programme and a Film Fellow at the Dharamshala International Film Festival. She has worked as a Script Supervisor on several feature films including The Sweet Requiem, Chuskit, and The Disciple. She holds a degree in Film from the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore.
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Mehak will work with mentor Rahul Bhatia on Loal Kashmir, a book inspired by a memory project of the same name.
Aashna Jamal
Aashna Jamal grew up in Kashmir and writes stories about the region. Her work is published in Muse India, The Caravan, The Diplomat, The Madras Courier and Southeast Asia Globe. She is an economist with an MA in International and Development Economics from Yale University and a BA Economics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. She was last posted in Timor-Leste, where she served as an international civil servant under the Overseas Development Institute Fellowship scheme.
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Aashna is working with mentor Karan Mahajan on Hearsay, a novel.
Kartikeya Jain
Kartikeya Jain is a freelance writer, editor and translator in Delhi, India. His work appears in Scroll.in, The Deccan Herald, Thelallantop.com and nether Quarterly. He has edited literary translations and books on politics, philosophy and travel.
Kartikeya is working with mentor Arunava Sinha on a translation of Chandan Pandey’s Hindi novel, Keertigaan (Rajkamal Prakashan, 2022).
Maliha Khan
Maliha Khan is a writer and academic from Karachi, Pakistan. She moved to India on a Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University in 2016 and has lived in Delhi since. An essay on the Biharis in Karachi is forthcoming from Routledge in the collection Neighbourhoods and Neighbourliness: Subjectivities and Spatiality in Urban South Asia edited by Sadan Jha and Dev Nath Pathak.
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Maliha will work with mentor Taran Khan on a book about Karachi's food culture.
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Rana Saadullah Khan
Saadullah is a researcher in the field of history education in Lahore, Pakistan. His work is forthcoming in an anthology published by Vasl and in the 2022 Aleph Review.
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He is working with mentor Madhuri Vijay on a novel.
Ayesha Latif
Ayesha Latif teaches poetry and translation studies at the Department of Humanities at Comsats University, Islamabad, Pakistan. She is a Ph.D research scholar at the University of the Punjab, Lahore.
Ayesha will work with mentor Arunava Sinha on a translation of Piro Preman's Aik Sau Sath Kafian.
Sumallya
Mukhopadhyay
Sumallya Mukhopadhyay is a doctoral fellow at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi, India. His research focusses on the intersection of oral narratives and memory studies against the backdrop of the 1947 Bengal Partition. He is the winner of an Oral History Association Scholarship and a TATA - 1947 Partition Archive Research Grant.
Sumallya will work with mentor Aanchal Malhotra on a book of creative non-fiction based on the Partition of India.
Prateek Nigam
Prateek Nigam is a software developer in Bengaluru, India. His stories appear in Jaggery Lit, Muse India, and Out of Print. He was short-listed for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2019.
Prateek will work with mentor Deepa Anappara on a collection of short stories.
Deepa Padmanaban
Deepa Padmanaban writes about the environment, climate change, wildlife conservation, health, and science. She is published in The Guardian, Mongabay, National Geographic, The Third Pole, The Wire, India Spend, The Hindu, and Mint. She lives in Bengaluru, India.
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Deepa is working with mentor McKenzie Funk on a reported piece on the impact of human activity on the smooth-coated otters of the Cauvery River.
Abhay Puri
Abhay Puri is a freelance writer based between Goa and Mumbai. He is an alumnus of the UEA India Creative Writing and Dum Pukht fiction workshops. He has worked in advertising, editing and film over the past decade. His work appears on screen in various forms and is also forthcoming in an anthology from Helter Skelter.
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Abhay is working with mentor Prayaag Akbar on a collection of short stories
Parni Ray
Parni Ray has an MA in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and was a Charles Wallace Fellow at Royal College of Art, London. Her research interests include demolition, disrepair and waste.
Parni will work with mentor Sonia Faleiro to analyse the connection between India's built environment and climate.
Sudeshna Rana
Sudeshna Rana is a writer, poet, and editor with an MA in English Literature from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi. Her work appears in the Narrow Road Journal, Feminism in India, Cocoa & Jasmine Magazine, and The Shape Of A Poem published by Red River Publishing. A piece on female friendship will appear in an anthology published by Yoda Press.
Sudeshna is working with mentor Mira Kamdar on a book about the city where she grew up— Dhanbad, the Coal Capital of India.
Sanjana Ramachandran
Sanjana Ramachandran is a writer and marketer. She has led marketing for Ariel, Tide and The Ken across South Asia, launched Tide Pods in India, and helped pivot The Caravan from advertising-driven to subscription journalism. Her articles on business, tech and culture appear in The Caravan, ThePrint, Fifty Two.In, Rest of World, The Ken, and Raiot magazine. She hopes to someday see her screenplays become films.
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Sanjana is working with mentor Sanam Maher on a collection of essays, Famous Last Questions.
Zoya Rehman
Zoya Rehman is a feminist researcher and organiser in Islamabad, Pakistan. She studies the intersection of gender, law, and the internet through her writing and research. Zoya has a master's degree in Gender Studies and Law from SOAS, University of London and is a recipient of the Chevening Scholarship Award.
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Zoya and her collaborator Tooba Syed are working with mentor Taran Khan on Feminist Visions of Resistance and Justice in Pakistan, a study.
Suchitra Ramachandran
Suchitra Ramachandran is a writer and translator working in Tamil. Her translations appear in Asymptote and Narrative Magazine.
She will work with mentor Arunava Sinha on an English translation of B.Jeyamohan's Tamil novel Mudharkanal.
Nicholas Rixon
Nicholas Rixon is a writer and editor in New Delhi, India. His work appears in Catapult, The Indian Quarterly, and Scroll.in.
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He is working with mentor Diksha Basu on a novella about the Anglo-Indian community.
Mohit M. Rao
Mohit M. Rao is an independent journalist in Bengaluru, India. Over the past decade, he's reported on the environment, labour, human rights and abuse of the law.
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He is working with mentor Fatima Bhutto on a non-fiction book on India's longest-running environment case.
Dua Abbas Rizvi
Dua Abbas Rizvi is a visual artist and journalist in Lahore, Pakistan. Her writing on art, culture, and South Asia appear in the Pakistani publications Herald, The Friday Times, Dawn, ArtNow, Libas International, and The Aleph Review, as well as in the American, British, and German publications Image Journal, Encounters: The Art of Interfaith Dialogue, Selvedge Magazine, and the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception.
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Dua is working with mentor Fatima Bhutto on a memoir, Brown Girl and Pale Poet.
Prthvir Solanki
Prthvir Solanki is a writer with experience collaborating on fiction and non-fiction films, as well as on digital content for reputed brands. He lives in Mumbai.
Prthvir is working with mentor Mahesh Rao on a book of short stories.
Uma Shirodkar
Uma Shirodkar is a freelance social media manager in Mumbai, India. A language enthusiast, she has a keen interest in the history, culture and linguistic traditions of South Asia. During the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, Uma rediscovered her love for translation and hasn't looked back since.
Uma is working with mentor Arunava Sinha on translating an anthology of short stories from Marathi to English.
Tooba Syed
Tooba Syed is a feminist organiser and researcher in Islamabad, Pakistan. She has been a part of feminist and leftwing organising for a decade and works with various social movements and grassroots organisation across South Asia. She is also a visiting faculty of gender studies at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. Tooba is associated with the socialist feminist organisation Women Democratic Front and with the leftwing Awami Workers Party.
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Tooba and her collaborator Zoya Rehman will work with Taran Khan on Feminist Visions of Resistance and Justice in Pakistan, a study.
Darun Subramanian
Darun Subramanian is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Cultural Studies, EFLU, Hyderabad, India. His research focuses on modern Tamil literary and intellectual history. His translation of Ka.Naa.Subramanyam’s essay Modern Literature has been anthologized in Global Modernists on Modernism published by Bloomsbury Academic.
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Darun is working with mentor Arunava Sinha on a translation of T.M.C. Ragunathan’s biography of the Tamil writer Pudumaippithan
Sukhada Tatke
Sukhada Tatke is an independent reporter and writer from Mumbai, India currently based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She writes on books, culture, immigration, belonging, history and social justice. Her essays and features appear in The Rumpus, Al Jazeera, Wired, Texas Monthly, FiftyTwo, Atlas Obscura and Indian Quarterly. She has worked as a staff reporter at The Times of India and The Hindu.
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Sukhada is working with mentor Tania James on Late Fee, a collection of short stories.
Mariam Tareen
Mariam Tareen is a writer, teacher, and founder of The Writing Room, a platform for aspiring writers, where she conducts workshops and teaches children the magic and craft of writing stories. Mariam
reviews books for Pakistan's Dawn newspaper and lives in Lahore.
She is working with mentor Fatima Bhutto on a children's novel.