Salma

Salma is a writer of poetry and fiction. Based in the small town of Thuvarankurichi, she is recognized as a writer of growing importance in Tamil literature. Her work combines a rare outspokenness about taboo areas of the traditional Tamil women’s experience with a language of compressed intensity and startling metaphoric resonance. She has faced great adversity-including obscenity charges and violent threats for her erotic poetry, and living locked away by her family-to also become a major political leader and campaigner for women’s rights. She is the subject of an eponymous documentary film by Kim Longinotto. Her debut novel, The Hour Past Midnight, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Women, Dreaming is her second novel.

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. Exquisite Cadavers is her latest novel.