David Sassoon Library Garden
7/2/2009
Urvashi Butalia will officially open the Kalaghoda literature festival with a lecture. This is to be followed by a brief discussion with Anita Roy, the moderator, and an interactive session with the audience.
Urvashi Butalia is co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house and is now Director of Zubaan, an imprint of Kali. Active in the women’s movement for several decades, Butalia is also a writer who works on a range of issues, and writes widely for newspapers and magazines. Among her books are: Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays (co-edited with Tanika Sarkar), Speaking Peace: Women’s Voices on Kashmir, Inner Line: Women’s Writings from India, Katha: Stories by Women from India (all edited).
Her best known work is the widely acclaimed book The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, which has been translated into several languages and which won the Oral History Book Association Award 2001 and the Nikkei Asia Award for Culture in 2003. Butalia is currently working on a number of new books.
Anita Roy was born in Calcutta in 1965 but grew up in England. She returned to India in 1996 to join Oxford University Press in Delhi as an academic commissioning editor, before joining Dorling Kindersley India as editorial director. She is currently commissioning editor for children’s and young adults’ books with Zubaan, an independent, feminist publishing house.
She is also a writer whose non-fiction work has been anthologized in several books, and a regular reviewer, critic and freelance writer for Outlook, Outlook Traveller, The Hindu, Biblio and others. She has been a columnist for City Limits magazine and Man’s World. She has edited the short story collection, 21 Under 40, and has been on the judging panels of the Crossword Book Award in previous years. She is one of the founders and trustees of the Bookaroo Trust for Children’s Literature, and helped to organize India’s first children’s literature festival at Sanskriti Anandgram in Delhi, November 2008. She is an avid and eclectic reader; an enthusiastic if erratic cyclist; and a peculiar (according to her 6-year-old offspring) mum.
