Salma

Salma is a writer of Tamil poetry and fiction. Based in the small town of Thuvarankurichi, she is recognised as a writer of growing importance in Tamil literature. Her work combines a rare outspokenness about taboo areas of the traditional Tamil wmen’s experience with a language of compressed intensity and startling metaphoric resonance. Her debut novel The Hour Past Midnight was long listed for the Man Booker Asia Prize.

Meena Kandasamy is a poet, fiction writer, translator and activist who lives in Chennai and London. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch and Ms. Militancy, and the critically acclaimed novels The Gypsy Goddess and When I Hit You, Or, The Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018. She is the editor of the poetry collection Desires Become Demons (Tilted Axis Press 2019), in which her translations of four Tamil women poets are included alongside some by the late Lakshmi Holmström.