Sessions
Messy Women: Writing Complex Female Characters
Kiran Manral*, Madhumita Bhattacharyya, Nisha Susan*, Jahnavi Barua with Gayatri Chandrasekharan
* Indicates that the speaker will be participating at the Festival via Zoom
The Big Short: Big Idea, Short Stories
Humra Quraishi*, Jahnavi Barua, Vasudhendra with Gita Aravamudan
* Indicates that the speaker will be participating at the Festival via Zoom
Bio
Jahnavi Barua is an Indian writer based in Bangalore. Next Door (Penguin India, 2008), her debut collection of short stories was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her next, a novel called Rebirth (Penguin India, 2010), was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. The third, Undertow, a novel, was published by Penguin Random House India (Viking Books) in February 2020 and was longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature 2020 and the BLF Atta Galatta Book Prize 2020. It won the Best Fiction Prize in the Auther Award 2021 and the Kalinga Literary Festival Award for Fiction, 2021. Her short fiction has been widely anthologized and her work is part of several university syllabi. Jahnavi is a qualified doctor but does not practise medicine. She was born in Guwahati and raised between Assam, Shillong and Delhi.