Join International Booker Prize winning translator Daisy Rockwell, PEN/Heim Translation Grant winner Shabnam Nadiya, Sahitya Akademi winner Srinath Perur and others read from their translations from Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Telugu, and Urdu.
After the success of last year's inaugural collaborative event, South Asian Literature in Translation (SALT) and the South Asia Institute (SAI) are thrilled to host another evening of reading in Chicago to celebrate the literary richness of South Asia.
Join International Booker Prize winning translator Daisy Rockwell, PEN/Heim Translation Grant winner Shabnam Nadiya, Sahitya Akademi winner Srinath Perur and others read from their translations from Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Telugu, and Urdu.
After the success of last year's inaugural collaborative event, South Asian Literature in Translation (SALT) and the South Asia Institute (SAI) are thrilled to host another evening of reading in Chicago to celebrate the literary richness of South Asia.
The event includes light bites. Admission ($5) will be waived for students.
Daisy Rockwell is an artist, writer, and Hindi-Urdu translator living in Vermont. Her translations have been awarded the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Scaglione Prize, and the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation. Her memoir Our Friend, Art is forthcoming from Pushkin Press, 2027.
Shabnam Nadiya is a Bangladeshi writer and translator. A Steinbeck Fellow and PEN awardee, her work has been published widely, including in the W.W. Norton collection Flash Fiction International, and NYPL's Pocket Poems series. Her translations include Good Girls (Leesa Gazi/Amazon Crossing), and The Meat Market (Mashiul Alam/Westland).
Srinath Perur writes on science, travel and books, and translates from Kannada. He is the author of a travelogue If It's Monday It Must Be Madurai, and the translator of Vivek Shanbhag's Ghachar Ghochar and Sakina's Kiss. He lives in Bengaluru.
Safia Mahmood is an emerging scholar and translator who works with excavating Dalit silences in predominantly Pakistani literature in English, Urdu and Punjabi. Previously a journalist and art curator, she is now pursuing a PhD in English at UMass Amherst.
Shuchi Agrawal is an Indian writer and translator who is studying at the University of Cambridge. As part of her ALTA mentorship with Daisy Rockwell, she is translating a colonial romance set in 1920s Bihar between a zamindar's daughter and a farmer's son from Hindi into English.
Afsar Mohammad writes in Telugu and English and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. His publications include his Telugu poems in translation, Evening with a Sufi and collection of short stories, Sahil Will Come and Other Stories. A book of poems in English, A Note of Discord, is forthcoming.
Azhar Wani is a translator from Kashmir. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University. His works have appeared in Fountain Ink Magazine, Trampset, VAYAVYA, Aleph Review, Inverse Journal, and Multitudes.
Janani Comar is a PhD candidate in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include Tamil and Telugu literature, caste, and performance. She was a Fulbright-Nehru Student Research awardee (2022) and a Critical Digital Humanities Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute (2023).
Bishnupriya Chowdhuri is a bilingual writer and translator from West Bengal who leads the editorial team for Antonym Collection publishing in India. She edits and translates fiction, creative nonfiction, memoirs and experimental lyrical prose from Bengali into English. For her ALTA fellowship, she is translating the novel Khanandihi.
Sahana Hegde is a NYC-based writer and translator, where she is pursuing a Master’s degree at the Mailman School of Public Health. She minored in creative writing at Ashoka University and is currently working on a translation of a Kannada novel into English, as well as a work of original fiction, also in English.
Sadia Khatri is a writer, translator, filmmaker and organizer. She founded Amrit Pyala, an audio-visual archive of mystic poetry and folk music in Pakistan. She is from Karachi.
Akshay Aitha (he/him) is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. His interests include both theoretical and descriptive linguistics of Telugu (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics) and questions concerning political and social identities in the Telugu context, both in South Asia and in the diaspora.