Anja Snellman (Finnish: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Film, Theater)
Anja is a novelist, freelance journalist and free soul living in the capital city of Helsinki. She has also lived part time in Greece for 20 years, in Chania, Crete. Anja has written 20 novels and two collections of poetry. She has also written film scripts and plays. Her books have been translated into 16 languages. She is married to a rock guitarist and has two daughters. For more information, please visit: www.anjasnellman.com and www.stilton.com

Birgitta Wallin (Swedish: Translation)
Birgitta was born in a small town in Sweden. She has now lived in Stockholm for almost thirty years. She works as an editor of a literary magazine and as a translator for literature from English.

Christopher Kloeble (German: Fiction, Theater, Film)
Christopher was born in Germany. His plays have been staged in major theatres in Vienna, Munich, Heidelberg and Nuremberg. For his first novel ‘Amongst Loners’ he won the Juergen Ponto-Stiftung prize for best debut 2008; his second book ‘A Knock at the Door’ was published 2009. The third, ‘Almost everything very fast’, will appear in March 2012. His first movie script, Inclusion, was produced in 2011.

Douna Loup (French: Fiction)
Douna was born in Switzerland and spent her childhood in France. When she was eighteen, she worked for six months as volunteer at an orphanage in Madagascar. After that experience, she returned to France to study ethnology and healing plants. In April 2010, Douna published a first book Mopaya. It is the story of a migrant from Congo (L’harmattan) and was based on interviews with Gabriel Nganga Nseka. In September 2010 Douna published her first novel L’embrasure (Mercure de France) and it received several literary prizes including the Prix Schiller découverte, Prix Thyde Monnier de la SGDL, Prix Michel-Dentan, Prix René Fallet et Prix Léopold Léonard Senghor.

Eugene Lee (Korean: Theater)
Eugene has anf MFA in Playwriting from the Korean National University for the Arts and her plays have been staged in Seoul and other parts of Korea. She has several play scripts to her credit, most recently “Toilet Goddess.” Eugene has also won awards for her music compositions.

Frances Greenslade (English: Fiction)
Frances was born in St. Catharines, Ontario in Canada and has since lived in three other provinces. As a migrant Canadian, writing in English, the idea of home, and the search for it, is a dominant theme in her writing. Her first book, A Pilgrim in Ireland: A Quest for Home, was published by Penguin in 2002. Her second book, By the Secret Ladder: A Mother’s Initiation (Penguin, 2007) is a memoir about the soul-rearranging first year of motherhood. Shelter, a novel, was published by Random House in August 2011.

Francesca Marciano (English,Italian: Fiction, Film)
Francesca was born in Rome and lived in the US and in Kenya for many years. She is the author of three novels published in the US by Knopf, all of which were written in English. She has also written several film scripts, mostly for the Italian cinema. She uses both languages, Italian and English, in her writing, although English is the language she uses when writing fiction.

SA KANDASAMY (Tamil: Fiction)
A first generation learner in his family, Kandasamy’s literary career took off in 1968 with the publication of his novel Chayavanam listed by the National Book Trust as a masterpiece in modern Indian Literature. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1998 for his novelVicharanai (Commission). He is also a short film producer.

Kumani Gantt (English: Theater, Poetry)
Kumani’s plays and performance pieces include meditations/from the ash, winner of the Artscape 1997 Best Play Contest and voted Best New Play by the Baltimore Alternative; Three Stories to the Ground, written with Gabriel Shanks and winner of the Theatre Project Outstanding Vision In Theatre Award; anatomy/lessons selected as part of Penumbra Theater’s Cornerstone Project; Communion written with actress Vanessa Thomas for Washington, DC’s Horizons Theater, Testament, a play inspired by Antigone performed by the Village of Arts and Humanities in 2006; and the work-in-progress, The Gift, which received a staged reading as part of ACT’s Central Theatre Lab in June 2011. In 2003, her collection of poetry, conjuring the dead, was awarded the Maryland Emerging Writers Award by poet, Afaa Michael Weaver. She holds a MFA in Theatre Performance from Towson University and lives in Seattle.

Lotte Thrane (Danish: Nonfiction)
Lotte has a PhD in Philosophy and has worked as a professor in Scandinavian Literature at the University of Copenhagen, the University of East Anglia, the University of Illinois and at Eberhard-Karls-Universität, Tübingen. She has received scholarships from The Carlsberg Foundation, The Novo Nordisk Foundation and Accademia di Danimarca in Rome. She has curated exhibitions for Danish art museums and worked as an editor at Gyldendal Publishers. Her latest book, the monograph Master of Twilight. Ten Chapters on Lorenz Frølich and his Time received Danish Authors’ Society’s literary award for 2010. Lotte is currently working on a monograph on travelling women, as well as a book about German and Danish artists in Italy from 1840-1860.

MINAKSHI THAKUR (Hindi, English: Poetry, Fiction)
Minakshi Thakur was born in England and grew up in India. She published a book of English Poems, An Indian Evening, with the Writers Workshop in 2002 and two collections of Hindi poems, Jab Utthi Yavanika and Neend Ka Akhiri Pul in 2003 and 2010. She is a trained Indian classical singer. Currently she works with HarperCollins Publisher India and is writing her first novel in English.

NABINA DAS (English, Assamese, Bengali: Fiction, Poetry)
Born and brought up in Guwahati, Assam, India, Nabina Das has a novel titled “Footprints in the Bajra” (Cedar Books) and an MFA from Rutgers University, while her poetry collection “Into the Migrant City” is forthcoming soon. A residency winner at the 2011 NYS Summer Writers Institute, Nabina writes in English and occasionally in Assamese and Bengali. Winner of several national poetry prizes, Nabina’s poem has been included in the Nagaland Secondary Board of Education syllabus. A 2007 Joan Jakobson (Wesleyan) and 2007 Julio Lobo (Lesley) fiction scholar, she has worked in journalism and media for about 10 years, trained in Hindustani classical music, and performed in radio/TV programs. Nabina lectures in classrooms/workshops, designs brochures and poetry post cards, and blogs at http://nabinadas13.wordpress.com/.She loves reading (never call it teaching) poetry and doing street theater with children.

NITOO DAS (English, Assamese: Poetry, Translation)
Nitoo teaches English at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She was born in Guwahati, but has survived in Delhi since 1994. Her first poetry collection, Boki, was published in September 2008. Her poetry has also been published in online sites like “Poetry International Web”, “Pratilipi”, “Muse India”, “Eclectica”, “Poetry with Prakriti” and in several anthologies. Das’s poetry works with voice, soundscape and comic defamiliarisation. Her interests include fractals, photography, caricatures, comic books, horror films, poetry as hypertext and translation from Assamese to English.

RAHUL SONI (English: Fiction, Translation)

Writer (English) and translator (Hindi to English) based in New Delhi,India. Founder and editor of Pratilipi (www.pratilipi.in), a literary journal, and Pratilipi Books (www.pratilipibooks.com), an independent publishing venture. Chief Editor with Writer’s Side, a literary agency and manuscript assessment service. Work has appeared or is forthcoming in Almost Island, Asymptote, Biblio, Dhauli Review, Hindi, Indian Literature, Pratilipi, Tehelka etc. Currently translating Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tirohit for Harper Collins India and Shrikant Verma’s Magadh. Other works-in-progress include a documentary, a novel, and a non-fiction book. Awarded the Charles Wallace Visiting Fellowship in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, for the year 2010, for working on Magadh and Dharamvir Bharati’s novel, Suraj ka Saatvan Ghoda.

V SANJAY KUMAR (English: Fiction)

After completing his MBA Sanjay set up businesses in financial services and software in Mumbai and Chennai. A chance encounter led to a long standing partnership in an art gallery called Sakshi Gallery which is based in Mumbai and Taipei. The contemporary art world straddles commerce and fine art and the uneasy union is of particular interest. Dealing with artists helped expand Sanjay’s horizon. He now has a focused art collection and has also written occasionally for art catalogs and magazines. His first book, a novel titled ‘Artist, Undone’ is being published by Hachette India.

N SUKUMARAN (Tamil, Malayalam, English: Poetry, Fiction, Non-fiction)
Poet, Writer, Translator and Journalist. Writes primarily write in Tamil, occasionally in Malayalam and English. Had been the Executive Editor of the Tamil magazine Kungumam, Chennai, Chief News Editor of Surya TV , a Malayalam satellite channel, Trivandrum and Chief Editor of Pulari prasitheekaranam a Malayalam publishing house, unit of New Horizon media Pvt Ltd., Trivandrum.

SURENDRA VARMA (Hindi, Urdu, English: Fiction, Drama, Film)
Surendra Varma has a Master’s in Linguistics and was a teacher for a few years. He writes novels, plays and screenplays in chaste Hindi, chaste Urdu and English. He lives in Delhi.

Always a local port, Tharangambadi (“the place of the singing waves”) became an outpost of the short-lived Danish East India Company in the early 17th century. The Danes built a factory there, a place for civilians to live and trade and transformed the Tamil name into the equally lilting Tranquebar. About a century later, in 1712, two Lutheran missionaries, Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Pluetschau, brought a great treasure to the little town – they established a printing press, the first one on the sub-continent – and began to publish in the local language. Their first printed work was a Tamil translation of the Bible. Ziegenbalg was determined to share his great treasure and soon, printing technology moved to other parts of the sub-continent. By 1845, the British East India Company had taken over the small Danish colonial holdings and over-ridden what was left of Danish culture there.

But Tranquebar’s unique place in the history of Indian print and publishing remains. As does Denmark’s barely known contribution to this remarkable moment that shaped the flow of literature and advanced the development of literary cultures in the centuries that followed. Along with its supporting partners, Sangam House is proud to acknowledge this historical moment with an anthology of writing from Danish and Indian writers.

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Writers at Tranquebar in August 2011

Chandrahas Choudhury is a novelist and literary critic based in Mumbai. He is the author of the novel Arzee the Dwarf (2009), which was recently named by World Literature Today magazine as one of 60 essential English-language works of modern Indian literature, and the editor of the just-published anthology India: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press, USA, and HarperCollins India). Choudhury’s book reviews and essays have appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, The Observer, and Foreign Policy. He writes the literary blog The Middle Stage, and is also a contributing editor of  The Caravan. He was recently a Fellow of the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa.

Merete Pryds Helle has studied literature, medieval history and Near Eastern Archaeology at Copenhagen University. She published her first novel in 1990 and since then published several novels, short story collections, a little poetry, drama for the radio, children’s books and literature for SMS and the iPad. Merete has lived for eight years in Italy but now lives in Copenhagen. She is married with two children.

Benn Q. Holm works and lives in Copenhagen with wife and three noisy children. Has published ten novels. These days, he is putting the finishing touches on number eleven, Byen og Øen (The City And The Island).

Giriraj Kiradoo has published poems, criticism, translations and few short stories in a number of Hindi journals and publications, some of which have been translated into Urdu, Marathi, Catalan and English. He is a translator in Hindi, English and Rajasthani currently translating two novels -Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy into Hindi and Gitanjali Shree’s Tirohit into Hindi as well as two Sahitya Akademi Award winning Hindi poets, Shree Kant Verma and Arun Kamal into, English. He is the founder of Udaharan, an alternative publisher and independent forum. Besides teaching English at a University, he is an editor with Siyahi and runs Pratilipi, a bi-lingual journal.

Josefine Klougart studied History of Literature at the University of Århus and has attended the Danish Writers’ School. Her debut novel, Rise and Falls, was nominated for the esteemed Nordic Council’s Literary Prize. The underground publishing house, Fingerprint, released her second book in October 2011. In January 2011 Klougart’s second novel, Hallerne, was published.  And in the spring of 2012 her third novel, Én af os sover, will be published by Rosinante. Klougart lives and works full time as a writer in Copenhagen, Denmark. Take a look at: www.josefineklougart.dk

Dilip Kumar, whose mother tongue is Gujarati, a well-known short story writer in Tamil with several awards to his credit. He has published two collections of short stories (Moongil Kuruthu, Cre-A, Chennai, 1985, and Kaduvu, Cre-A, Chennai, 2000) and a critical work on Mauni – a pioneer of Tamil short stories (Mouniyudan Koncha Thooram, Vanadhi Pathipagam, Chennai, 1992). He lives in Chennai and runs a small literary bookshop.

Mette Moestrup made her debut as a poet in 1998 with Tattoos, followed by Golden Delicious in 2002 and Kingsize in 2006. Her latest book is a short novel, called Leveled to the Ground was released in 2009. She has also written two books for children. Mette performs in a sound-and-poetry duo called SHE’S A SHOW. She lives in Copenhagen and works as a teacher at the writer’s school in Göteborg, Sweden.

Ruben Palma was born in Chile, in 1954. Thanks to the United Nations and the Danish Embassy in Buenos Aires, he came to Denmark as a political refugee in 1974. He had never written before, when he began writing in Danish in 1985. Last published and performed works: short stories, poems and an opera libretto.

Kutti Revathi is the pen name of Dr. S. Revathi. She has published three books of poetry and is the editor of Panikkudam, a literary quarterly for women’s writing and also the first Tamil feminist magazine. She holds a Bachelors degree in Siddha medicine and surgery, and is currently pursuing her doctoral research in medical anthropology at the Madras Institute of Development Studies in Chennai. Revathi received the Sigaram 15: Faces of Future award for literature from India Today (a Tamil weekly) and was awarded a travel grant in 2005 by the Sahitya Akademi to meet leading literateurs from various parts of the country.

Nilanjana Roy lives in Delhi and is a literary columnist who also writes on gender issues. Her columns currently appear in the Business Standard and the International Herald Tribune. She has spent several decades working extensively in publishing and the media; she was Senior Features Editor at the Business Standard, has been a consulting editor with Outlook and with Man’s World, and was Chief Editor at the publishing house Westland/ Tranquebar. She is the editor of Penguin India’s anthology of food writing, A Matter of Taste, and is working on a collection of essays on reading, How To Read in Indian, to be published soon by HarperCollins India.