Abhay Sardesai
Editor
Anamika
Poet
Anant Nath
Journalist
Anjali Purohit
Writer-Artist
Ashis Nandy
Author
Ayaz Memon
Sports Journalist
Chandan Gowda
Social Theorist
Danish Husain
Filmmaker
Darab Farooqui
Writer
Dipika Roy
Actor
Dolly Thakore
Actor
Durga Prasad Panda
Bilingual Poet & Critic
Fahad Samar
Filmmaker & Author
GSP Rao
Managing Editor, Muse India
Hemant Divate
Poet
Jyoti Narula Ranjan
Co-Founder, Syntalk
K. Srilata
Poet
Kamal Vora
Poet
Manu Dash
Poet
Mustansir Dalvi
Architect & Poet
Nabina Das
Poet
Namita Devidayal
Author
Nandan Maluste
Banker
Neena Gupta
Actor
Paritosh Joshi
Advisor, Sun TV
Rama Lakshmi
Journalist
Richa Shah
Publisher
Rosinka Chaudhuri
Poet
Sachin Ketkar
Writer
Samir Somaiya
Sampurna Chatterji
Poet
Sanjeev Khandekar
Writer & Visual Artist
Sarabjeet Garcha
Literary Translator
Smita Sahay
Writer
Smruti Divate
Publisher
Sony Shrivastava
Education Management Professional
Taseer Gujral
Writer
Vaishali Narkar
Visual Artist
Our Friends
Frankly, what helped us take this project forward from being a germ of an idea to a full blown project was the support from our friends across the spectrum. Friends of the Collective are accomplished writers, thinkers, poets or just evolved readers. Often, we approached them to become a mentor, but they felt they were pressed for time and joined as friends instead! We hope that conversations about Indian novels will continue to grow and be enriched.
Fahad Samar
Filmmaker & Author
Fahad Samar is the best-selling author of Scandal Point. He began his career as a film-maker with Merchant-Ivory Productions in 1987. In 1993, Fahad established his company, Bombay Talkie and has since written, directed and produced scores of commercials, documentaries, corporate films and TV shows. A pioneer in youth culture programming in India, Fahad is also a well-known social commentator and has contributed columns regularly to the Mumbai Mirror, DNA and the Indian Express over the past ten years.
GSP Rao
Managing Editor, Muse India
G S P Rao, aka Surya Rao, is the founding Managing Editor of Muse India, the literary eJournal that pioneered Hyderabad Literature Festival. Author of Meghamitra and Other Poems; The Lock at the Gate (short stories); and Krishnadeva Raya – the great Poet-Emperor of Vijayanagara (historical biography), he is a software engineer by qualification. He has had a distinguished professional career in Information Technology and was earlier associated with IBM and ASCI.
Hemant Divate
Poet
Hemant Divate is a Marathi poet, editor, publisher and translator. He is the author of six poetry collections in Marathi. He has a book each in Spanish, Irish, Arabic, German and Estonian apart from four in English and has been translated into many foreign and Indian languages. He is the founder-editor of the prestigious Marathi little magazine Abhidhanantar, which has been a solid platform to new poets and for enriching the post-nineties Marathi literary scene. His publishing house, Paperwall Media & Publishing, has published (under its Poetrywala imprint) more than 100 poetry collections. He has won several prominent awards, including the Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad Award (Kolkata, India), Maharashtra Foundation Award (USA) and Aksharrang Lokmat Award. He has also translated many poets through English into Marathi, some of which have been anthologized and published in book form.
Jyoti Narula Ranjan
Co-Founder, Syntalk
Jyoti Narula Ranjan (Founder Synner, SynTalk): Jyoti is the Founder Synner of SynTalk. SynTalk (short for Synthesis Talk) is a freewheeling interdisciplinary talk show with a philosophical approach to understanding the world from a long term perspective. Over the last over three years, SynTalk has released over 100 episodes and hosted nearly 300 SynTalkrs (guests) from a wide range of disciplines. Jyoti has conceived the show & the platform and drives pre-production research, episode prototyping, episode design and technology-led dissemination. Jyoti has worked with several leading global and Indian technology companies and start-ups including Google, Star India (‘Hotstar’), Aricent, and Netcore.
K. Srilata
Poet
K. Srilata is a poet, fiction writer and Professor of English at IIT Madras. Her books include four poetry collections: Bookmarking the Oasis, Writing Octopus, Arriving Shortly and Seablue Child, a novel Table for Four, long listed in 2009 for the Man Asian literary prize and published by Penguin in 2011, two co-edited anthologies The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry and Short Fiction from South India, a translation of R. Vatsala’s Tamil novel Once there was a girl (Vattathul) and a translation of women’s writing from the Self-Respect movement The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History. Yoda Press recently published an Indo-Irish collaborative poetry anthology All the Worlds Between that she co-edited with Fiona Bolger.
Kamal Vora
Poet
Kamal Vora is a Gujarati poet and editor from Mumbai, India. He is an editor of Etad, a quarterly Guajarati literary magazine, and a member of the Gujarati advisory board of Sahitya Akademi. His first anthology of poem Arav was published in 1991, followed by Anek Ek (2012), and Anekanek (2014). His poems have been translated in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada and English and appeared in Indian Literature, Chicago Review, Anthology of Asian Poets, Muse India etc.