Priyamvada Ramkumar

Bio

Priyamvada Ramkumar is a private equity investor and literary translator. She translates from her native tongue Tamil into English. Her first book-length translation, Stories of the True (a translation of B. Jeyamohan’s Aram), was published by Juggernaut Books in August 2022. She was also selected for the inaugural cohort of the South Asia Speaks Fellowship Programme in 2021, where she was mentored by Arunava Sinha.

In 2022, she was selected to be part of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) Emerging Translator's Mentorship Program where, under the guidance of award-winning translator, Kareem James Abu-Zeid, she worked on translating Jeyamohan’s novel, Vellai Yaanai (White Elephant). This project has also been chosen for the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants 2023 – the first work awarded from a South Indian language in the grant’s twenty-year history.

Along with writer and translator Suchitra Ramachandran, she recently co-founded Mozhi, an initiative that aims to bring together literatures from various Indian languages and provide a platform for critical discourse. She lives in Chennai.