Meena Kandasamy

Theme: ‘Reflections on caste annihilation, feminism and linguistic identity’

Meena Kandasamy is an anti-caste activist, poet, novelist and translator. She has always been interested in deconstructing violence, understanding the trauma caused by caste, gender, and ethnic oppressions, and spotlighting the militant resistance against these powerful systems. She explores these topics in her poetry and prose, most notably in her books of poems such as Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010), as well as her three novels, The Gypsy Goddess (2014), When I Hit You (2017), and Exquisite Cadavers (2019). Activism is at the heart of her literary work; she has translated several political texts from Tamil to English, and previously held an editorial role at The Dalit, an alternative magazine documenting caste-related brutality and the anti-caste resistance in India. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Hindu Lit Prize. She holds a PhD in sociolinguistics, and was recently Gallatin Global Faculty in Residence at New York University (NYU) where she co-taught a course on feminist writers from the neo-colonial world. Her op-eds and essays have appeared in The White Review, Guernica, The Guardian and The New York Times.