Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana
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Tabish Khair Born in Ranchi in 1966 and educated in Gaya, Bihar, Tabish Khair has won the All India Poetry Prize and been shortlisted for the Man Asian Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asia, the Encore Award (UK), the Crossword Vodafone Award and the Hindu Best Fiction Prize. His new novel The Thing About Thugs is already being translated into four languages. He is completing a play, The One Percent Agency, and a new novel, How to Fight Islamist Terror From the Missionary Position, both due in 2012. Web: http://www.tabishkhair.co.uk
Sharanya Manivannan’s first book of poems, Witchcraft, was published in 2008 and her fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in Drunken Boat, Killing the Buddha, The Nervous Breakdown, Pratilipi and elsewhere. She can be found online at www.sharanyamanivannan.com.
Kuzhali Manickavel is the author of a short story collection called In sects Are Just like You and Me except Some of Them Have Wings and an echapbook called Eating Sugar, Telling Lies, both of which are available from Blaft Publications. She lives in a small temple town on the coast of South India and blogs at http://thirdworldghettovampire.blogspot.com/.
Mary Anne Mohanraj wrote Bodies in Motion (a finalist for the Asian American Book Awards and translated into six languages) and nine other titles. Mohanraj received a Breaking Barriers Award from the Chicago Foundation for Women for her work in Asian American arts organizing, and has also won an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. Mohanraj is Clinical Assistant Professor of fiction and literature and Assoc. Dir. of Asian and Asian American Studies at the Univ. of Illinois. She serves as Exec. Dir. of DesiLit (www.desilit.org). Mohanraj lives in Oak Park with her partner, Kevin, and their two small children.
Shweta Narayan was born in India and has lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Scotland, and California. As a child, she says, she got really angry with Ram; this story has its seeds in that anger. Shweta’s fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, and the anthologies The Beastly Bride, Clockwork Phoenix 3, and Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, among others, and her poetry in places like Stone Telling, Goblin Fruit, and Strange Horizons. Shweta was the Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient at Clarion 2007. She hangs out online at shwetanarayan.livejournal.com.
Manjula Padmanabhan (b. 1953), writer and artist. Her books include Hot Death, Cold Soup, Getting There and This is Suki! Her most recent novel is ESCAPE, set in a dystopian future. Harvest, her fifth play, won first prize in the 1997 Onassis Award for Theatre in Greece. Her comic strip character Suki appeared weekly in Bombay’s Sunday Observer (1982-86), daily in New Delhi’s Pioneer (1991-97). She has illustrated some twenty-five books for children, the most recent of which is The World Tour Mystery, a picture-puzzle book.
Pratap Reddy was born in India and moved to Canada in 2002. He writes about the agonies and the angst (on occasion the ecstasies) of newly arrived immigrant. His work has been published in Canada, the USA and India. He has received the Best Emerging Literary Artist award from the Mississauga Arts Council, and a grant from the Ontario Arts Council. He has completed a creative writing program from the Humber School for Writers.
Julia A. Rosenthal is a freelance writer in Chicago. Her stories have appeared in the US-based publications A cappella Zoo, Ensorcelled, Kaleidotrope, and Columbia College’s annual Story Week Reader. She is working on a novel about the murder of a young king in early medieval England. Julia’s first encounter with the Ramayana came through R.K. Narayan’s prose translation, to which she is deeply grateful for the inspiration for The Mango Grove.
Pervin Saket is a writer and editor. Her fiction has been published in Kalkion, Page Forty Seven, Katha, Ripples and Perspectives among other print and online anthologies. She has written a collection of poems A Tinge of Turmeric and her poems have featured in Kritya and The Binnacle. Pervin conducts workshops on Creative Writing and Communication Skills, as well as Teacher Training programmes in various educational institutions. She blogs at www.pervinsaket.blogspot.com.
K. Srilata A poet, fiction writer and translator, Srilata is Associate Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras. Her books include a novel Table for Four (long listed for the Man Asian literary prize and published by Penguin in 2011, two collections of poems titled Arriving Shortly (Writers Workshop, 2011) and Seablue Child (Brown Critique, 2000), The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self- Respect History (Zubaan, 2003), Short Fiction from South India (OUP, 2007) and Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry (Penguin/Viking, 2009).
Srilata was a Charles Wallace Writer-in-residence at the University of Stirling, Scotland as well as a Sangam house writer-in- residence.
Aishwarya Subramanian was born in the West Indies and grew up in England and India, a list of loyalties that makes watching cricket a fraught activity. She went to Delhi University and Trinity College Dublin, and worked for two years in the children’s publishing industry. She currently lives and works in Delhi as a freelance editor, columnist and book reviewer. She sometimes writes short fiction, of which this is her third published work. She also maintains a blog, where she talks mostly about books.
Lavie Tidhar’s most recent novel is Osama (PS Publishing). It has been compared to Philip K. Dick’s seminal work, The Man in the High Castle by both the Guardian and the Financial Times. His other works include steampunk trilogy The Bookman, Camera Obscura and the forth coming The Great Game, all three from Angry Robot, the novellas Jesus k The Eightfold Path (Immersion Press), Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God (PS Publishing) and many others.
Tori Truslow grew up in Bangkok, and now lives in the UK, having recently graduated from the Warwick MA in Writing. Her fiction usually features some combination of storytelling, cities, the sea, gender and ghosts, and has appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 3, Verge 2011, Paraxis and elsewhere. Find her online at http://toritruslow.com. She is grateful to the Sala Chalermkrung Royal Theatre for the inspiration, and would like to point any visitors to Thailand towards it—it’s one of the few places you can still see a traditional Khon performance of the Ramakian.
Deepak Unnikrishnan writes. Short stories, mainly. He is Abu Dhabian, manufactured and product tested in the capital of the Emirates by a quiet yet befuddled South Indian family. His first set of shorts, Coffee Stains in a Camel’s Teacup (2004) was published by Vijitha Yapa Publications (Colombo, Sri Lanka). His work—essays, fiction—have appeared in Drunken Boat, Himal Southasian, Ego Magazine, among others.
Abirami A. Velliangiri has been published in Danse Macabre, Nether Magazine and The Brown Critique. In 2010, she won the third place in Poetry with Prakirti’s All-India poetry contest. Since childhood the Ramayana has taken many shapes in her mind, transforming from a beloved bedtime story, to racial propaganda, to a sublime love story and more recently to one of the most intense tragedies Indian literature has produced. She is now pursing her Masters at the London School of Economics and Political Science and enjoys poetry, prose and good cinema.
About the Editors
Anil Menon's stories have appeared in a variety of international magazines and anthologies. The Beast with Nine Billion Feet was published by Young Zubaan and shortlisted for the Vodafone-Crossword Prize. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA.
Vandana Singh was born and raised in New Delhi. As a teenager, she acquired a life-long interest in peace and environmental issues, and was one of the founders of the environmental NGO, Kalpavriksh. Her critically acclaimed anthology The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet, and her series for children featuring the character Younguncle, are published by Zubaan.
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