2 Years of SouthAsia Speaks!
As we get ready to welcome the next class of SouthAsia Speaks Fellows, here are some updates from the batch of 2022!
Hello Everyone! Hope your year’s off to a pleasant start!
Since 2021 when we launched South Asia Speaks, our fellows have made significant headway in their writing practice. They have worked on their manuscripts, won major prizes and fellowships, signed with agents, and published dozens of reported pieces in influential publications. Here’s what some of our fellows have to say about their experience with SAS:
“Being accepted as a SAS fellow pushed me out of my comfort zone and helped me report long features,” says 2022 reporting fellow Deepa Padmanabhan. “I thoroughly enjoyed the conversations with my mentor, McKenzie Funk, a very kind person. His questions and feedback helped me think beyond the reporting proposal, and his inputs on writing and shaping the pieces were very helpful. The recognition of being a SAS fellow opened opportunities to report and write other longform stories.”
“I really enjoyed working closely with Deepa Anappara, who is the kindest, most generous mentor,” says 2022 fiction fellow Prateek Nigam. “Deepa helped me with my craft and gave me the tools I needed to revise, edit, and restructure my stories. Before starting my writing project, I had a somewhat vague understanding of how to approach it, but with her inputs I was able to visualize a more concrete shape. Being able to attend masterclasses with acclaimed journalists and writers was wildly informative and kept the excitement going. Exchanging ideas with my fellow fiction writers, reading their work, and workshopping our stories helped me grow as a writer. This has been a very valuable experience and I am thankful to SAS for this amazing opportunity.”
Thanks everyone!
Now let’s take a look at what else our fellows have been up to:
Riddhi Dastidar won a Laadli Media Award for her story on Why Workplace Support Is A Basic Need For Women With Schizophrenia .
Illustration credits: Gulal Salil for IndiaSpend.com
Sharanya Deepak was awarded a 2022 One World Media Fellowship. Her piece Dear Neighbour, on fandom transcending polarized national borders, was published in Fifty Two.
Sukhada Tatke’s reported piece “Man of Culture”' made it to several reading lists around the world, including Longreads. Her collaborative piece with Ranjit Hoskote, Time Trails, was published in the Portside Review.
Image Credits: Akshaya Zachariah, FiftyTwo.in
Parni Ray’s deep dive on the government’s plans for Sabarmati Ashram was published in The Caravan magazine.
Mehak Jamal was signed by A Suitable Agency for her debut book. Her short film Bad Egg won the German Star of India- Audience Award at the 19th Indian Film Festival in Stuttgart.
Mohit Rao is a finalist for the Fulbright Humphrey Hubert Fellowship.
Duaa Amir created The Pakistani Feminist Archive to chronicle the experience of feminism in contemporary Pakistan.
Sanjana Ramachandran’s long-form stories for Fifty Two, "Restricted Code" and "The Namesakes" were submitted for the RedInk and Polestar awards.
Anmol Arora published a report on the challenges faced by queer couples for Xtra Magazine. They also wrote several pieces for Mint.
Ayesha Latif published an essay in Graveyards in Literature, an anthology from Cambridge Scholars Press.
Deepa Padmanabhan published a three- part story on The Human- Otter Conflict in the Cauvery for RoundGlass Sustain.
Sudeshna Raina wrote for and copyedited the 4th issue of Cocoa and Jasmine. She started a collaborative project called “Lit Clit”, to encourage discussions on gender and sexuality with women across the globe.
Uma Shirodkar completed three years of translating and talking about translations on her Instagram.
Suchismita Ghosh signed a translation deal with Jadavpur University Press for the Bengali edition of “My Father’s Garden" by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar and three stories from James Joyce's “Dubliners”. In 2022, she presented a paper on community reading habits at the Annual Conference of The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing in Amsterdam.
Darun Subramanian signed a publishing deal with Routledge, as the co translator of “Jainism and Tamil”, a translation of Mayilai Seeni. Venkatasam’s “Samanamum Tamizhum” (on the history of Jainism in Tamil Nadu).
Suchitra Ramachandran co-founded the collaborative literary translation project Mozhi with 2021 SAS fellow Priyamvada Ramkumar.
Prateek Nigam published a story in the BWW Bangalore Anthology published by Atta Galatta and edited by Bhumika Anand.
Other highlights from 2022 included Kartikeya Jain’s PEN presents prize, Sanjana Ramachandran’s translation of “Stories of the True” and the publication of A Case of Indian Marvels, featuring two SAS fellows and several mentors..
In 2023, we’re looking forward to the publication of “The Abyss”, SAS fellow Suchitra Ramachandran’s translation of B. Jeyamohan's Ezhaam Ulagam from Tamil ( Juggernaut).
That’s all for now. The next time you hear from us, we’ll have our next cohort of fellows. You can connect with us on Twitter and Instagram to see more of what we’re up to. Thank you for keeping in touch.