About

ANIL MENON estimates he is about 50% of the way into his hero’s journey. He has the usual list of awards-almost-won, residencies lounged at, stories translated into Igbo, movies acted in, and other happy side-effects of the writing life. He is the author of Half Of What I Say (Bloomsbury, 2015), a collection of speculative short fiction, The Inconceivable Idea Of The Sun (Hachette, 2022) and the novel The Coincidence Plot (Simon & Schuster, 2023).

PERVIN SAKET was awarded the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize 2021, and she was the inaugural Fellow for the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, 2021. She curated Literature at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2023, and is on the review committee of The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, 2023. Her poems, including the collection A Tinge of Turmeric have been widely anthologised. Her novel Urmila has been adapted for the stage, featuring classical Indian dance forms of Kathak, Bharatnatyam and Odissi. She has authored a series of eight landmark biographies for children, featuring Indian women in science and sports. Her work has been featured in The Indian Quarterly, Singapore Unbound, Paris Lit Up, Portside Review, Borderless Journal, The Madras Courier, and elsewhere. Pervin is the co-founder of the annual Kolam Writers’ Workshop, an intensive 2-week residency program for emerging writers.

YASHASVI VACHHANI is a writer, facilitator and curriculum developer of children’s creative writing and arts workshops. She has a keen interest in poetry and tea.

KUNJANA PARASHAR is a poet from Mumbai. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Indian Quarterly,  ASAP art, What Are Birds?,  SWWIM Every Day, Columba, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2021 Toto Funds the Arts award for poetry and the 2021 Deepankar Khiwani Memorial Prize.

ASWIN VIJAYAN is an Assistant Professor at the Zamorin’s Guruvayurappan College, Calicut and has an MA in Poetry from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast. His poems have been published in the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, Witness: The Red River Book of Poetry of Dissent, The Bombay Literary Magazine, and The Tangerine among others. He was awarded the Toto Award for Creative Writing in 2022.

ADITI RAO is a writer, teacher, and potter. She is the author of two full length books of poetry, The Fingers Remember (Yoda Press, 2014) and A Kind of Freedom Song (Yoda Press, 2019). She is currently working on her first non-fiction book, an oral history of women across India who were raised by single women. Aditi’s essays and poems have been published widely, and her work has received national and international recognition through several awards and fellowships, including the Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship, the Hedgebrook Residency, the Sangam House Writers’ Residency, the Srinivas Rayaprol Prize for Poetry, the TFA Creative Writing in English award, and the Muse India – Satish Verma Young Writer Award. Aditi has a Masters’ of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Sarah Lawrence College, and she has been teaching creative and research writing workshops since 2005. She also makes functional and whimsical pots under the banner of “HappyMess Ceramics”.

KINJAL SETHIA is a freelance writer-editor based in Pune. Presently she is working as a content strategist for a fin-tech startup. Her work has appeared at nether Quarterly, Borderless, Samyukta Fiction. She is a part of the writing collectives The Quarantine Train and Pune Writers’Group.

JIGAR BRAHMBHATT

When not busy with his software development job, Jigar is found thinking about stories. Everything that happens to him is fodder. So nothing in life is good or bad, but yet another opportunity for a workable story. He feels he has found his zen thus.

SHIVANI MUTNEJA found her way into print as a feisty feminist poet, but now she writes about ugly husbands, marital conundrums, and bizarre children. Her work has appeared in Nether Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Two Serious Ladies and decomp journal among others. Her blog on medium which began as a curation of philosophical dilemmas in the kitchen is now steadily transforming into a meditation on Rene Magritte’s clouds.

AMULYA B is a Bengaluru-based multimedia journalist, writer and translator who – when not doomscrolling – works in both Kannada and English languages. She is the only person to have won both Kannada and English Toto Funds the Arts (TFA) for Creative Writing in the same year (2021). Despite the craving for stability, she thrives best in between spaces (Kannada-English, Creative Writing-Journalism, Rural-Urban).

MANI RAO is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including Love Me In A Hurry (Atta Galatta 2022), Sing to Me (Recent Work, 2019) and Echolocation (Math Paper Press, 2014). Her books in translation from Sanskrit mediate between ancient India and today—the canonical Bhagavad Gita, the poetry and plays of Kalidasa, and Saundarya Lahari, the esoteric hymn to Shakti.

After studying literature in the early 80’s Madras, she earned her bread and preserve as an advertising and television professional for two decades in Mumbai, New Zealand and Hong Kong. A resetting of life-goals led her back to the world of learning– she then did an MFA from UNLV and a PhD in Religious Studies from Duke University. Researching mantra experience in tantric communities, she discovered new mantras and continuing revelations for Living Mantra: Mantra, Deities and Visionary Experience (Cham Springer, 2019). She lives in Bangalore with her parents and partner with whom she enjoys traveling off the beaten track.

PRIYANKA SARKAR is the translator of three novels and a few short stories from Hindi to English. She has also done some translation work from English to Hindi and Bangla to English. Her focus has been on translating women writers in Hindi into English. She has also written some short fiction and non-fiction.

She considers her life a series of happy coincidences, especially her entry into publishing in 2007 right after a Masters in Literature from DU and the beginnings of her life as a translator. She takes special delight in the irreverent and humorous and is always looking to read something that will blow her mind.

MANDAKINI PACHAURI: I have always unconsciously read and written snippets and reveries in several languages, walking around or on public transport. Some of these I bring to digital record and paper. It’s surprising to see my words on mothers or the woods make sense to others and my name at the end.

SIDDHARTH DASGUPTA writes poetry and fiction from cities inflicted with an existential throb. His fourth book—A Moveable East (Red River)—arrived in 2021. Siddharth’s literature has appeared in journals around the world, while he has read in places like Lucknow, Galle, Istanbul, Mandalay, and Paris. The arts & culture being a constant part of his life, Siddharth also articulates stories for a smattering of publications. With a prior background in branding & advertising, his literature is often infused with visual conversations. He lives in the city of Poona.

In the following months, Siddharth will reshape the visual language of The Bombay Literary Magazine, while curating and cultivating arts-based literature and narratives for the journal. You’ll find the author on Instagram @citizen.bliss and https://citizenbliss.squarespace.com

VASVI KEJRIWAL received her LLB from Queen Mary University London in 2019. Her work has been commended in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize. Vasvi’s works have appeared / forthcoming in Rattle, SWWIM Everyday, Nimrod and elsewhere.

NIKITA RAKHRA reports she is starting work on her law degree. And that in her spare time, she “fangirls over tennis and F1 while also writing when I can”.

ADITYA ATHALYE is here to tell you that this site works because of other peoples’ black magic. He’s pinched a book of spells and is trying to keep it up. He thinks the Internet is held together by duct tape and a hodgepodge of shell scripts. Sometimes he writes code that works sometimes. He lives in his head everywhere. But if you do catch him somewhere in meatspace, and it’s after 4PM, and he’s drinking any more filter coffee, please do everyone this favour. Gently pry the cup away from his hands. He can’t handle any more filter coffee after 4PM. His blog is just like this bio; took him forever to type out, and hasn’t really gone anywhere.

SUMIT SHETTY, when he is not cooking, eating or thinking about either, can be found in his usual habitat of his over-tinkered work desk where he haunts spaces between design and code. He claims he likes to make stuff but mostly dabbles in them until someone says he’s good at it and gets his ass in line. From such experiments have emerged projects like Aetherwise (a web-dev agency) and Webisoda (a platform for Indian OTT content).

He also manages to write (poetry & fiction) whenever he’s trying hard to ignore pressing business matters and has pieces published in The Yearbook of Indian Poetry 2020-21, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Alipore Post, Unlost Journal, Gulmohur Quarterly. He is an organiser with the Pune Writers’ Group, is working on a science-fiction novel, and also likes to play fast and loose with the term “working”

ARJUN RAJENDRAN’s most recent work is the much-praised poetry collection One Man, Two Executions (Westland, 2022). He’s also the author of  three other poetry books: The Cosmonaut in Hergé’s Rocket (Paperwall, 2017), Your Baby Is Starving (Aainanagar/VAYAVYA 2017), and  Snake Wine (Zaporogue, 2014). He was the Charles Wallace Fellow in Writing at The University of Stirling, Scotland (2018). His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, magazines and journals like SOFTBLOW, Eclectica, Poetry at Sangam, The Missing Slate, Asian Cha, and Berfrois.  In his tenure as poetry editor of TBLM (2017-2020),  he shepherded some seventy poets through the publication process.

ISHANI CHATTERJI is a content and social media consultant. She oscillates between copywriting for brands and writing for herself, the latter being the harder one. You can find her in the nooks and corners of bookstores and small cafes, usually curled up with a book about cities and people, and always with a steaming cup of black coffee. She watches theatre, loves essays and has a new found love for annotating everything she reads.Ishani was Social Media editor at TBLM from August 2022 through May 2023.

SHYAM MADHAVAN SARADA (“Greystroke”) Greystroke (aka Shyam Madhavan Sarada) is a writer, illustrator, art director, photographer and filmmaker.
Shyam began his professional illustrator’s career as the cartoonist for the erstwhile literary review magazine “Indian Review of Books” in 1995. Apart from the above, he is a founder-partner at Funky Rainbow, a leading independent retailer of Indian children’s books. Shyam was graphics designer at TBLM from April 2022 through August 2022. 

SAMPURNA CHATTARJI has published twenty books. These include the short story collection about Mumbai, Dirty Love (Penguin, 2013); and ten poetry titles, the most recent being Elsewhere Where Else (Poetrywala, 2018) and Space Gulliver: Chronicles of an Alien (HarperCollins, 2020). Her translation of Joy Goswami’s prose poems After Death Comes Water (HarperCollins, 2021) has been described as “a living voice, inventive and vivid as the English of Joyce”. Sampurna was TBLM’s poetry editor from September 2022 through March 2023.

UTKARSH MANI TRIPATHI writes essays on popular culture. He is deeply concerned with the state of children’s television. He also draws and cartoons on occasion.