The Young and the Restless
Rajith Savanadasa, Sangeetha Sreenivasan, Shubhangi Swarup, Snigdha Poonam with Roanna Gonsalves
Rajith Savanadasa
Bio
Rajith Savanadasa was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka and now lives in Melbourne. He was named a Best Young Australian Novelist by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2017 for his debut novel, Ruins, which was also shortlisted for the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal and the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction. Rajith is currently a resident writer at The Malthouse Theatre as part of their Living Now program.
Sangeetha Sreenivasan
Bio
Sangeetha Sreenivasan is a novelist and translator who writes in both Malayalam and English. She has recently translated Elena Ferrante’s ‘Days of Abandonment into Malayalam. She has six books to her credit including ‘Acid’ published by Penguin books, India. Her next novel, Salabham, Pookkal, Aeroplane, will be published in September 2018. She has won more than half a dozen awards for her novel including Fokana Award 2018, Thoppil Ravi Award, Malayattoor Prize, Rajalekshmi Award etc.
Shubhangi Swarup
Bio
Shubhangi Swarup is a journalist and educationist. She was awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship for Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and has also won awards for gender sensitivity in feature writing. She lives in Mumbai.
Snigdha Poonam
Bio
Snigdha Poonam is National Affairs Writer with the Hindustan Times and the author of Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World.
Roanna Gonsalves
Bio
Roanna Gonsalves is the author of The Permanent Resident (UWAP) published India and South Asia as Sunita De Souza Goes To Sydney (Speaking Tiger). She is the UNSW Copyright Agency Writer-in-Residence 2018, at the School of the Arts & Media. She was born and brought up in Mumbai, India. She came to Australia in 1998 as an international student, and currently lives in Sydney.
The Permanent Resident won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Multicultural Prize 2018, and was longlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award for first time published authors 2018. Her writing has been compared to the work of Alice Munro and Jhumpa Lahiri. Her book has quickly found a place on a number of lists of must-read books, is on the syllabi of courses at several universities and is being studied in the fields of Australian Literature, Postcolonial Literatures, and Creative Writing. According to the award-winning Australian writer Michelle De Kretser, The Permanent Resident is “a brilliant fashioning of newness in the Australian literary landscape”.
Her series of radio documentaries, On the tip of a billion tongues, commissioned and broadcast by Earshot, ABC RN, is an acerbic socio-political portrayal of contemporary India through its multilingual writers. She is a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Award, and is co-founder co-editor of Southern Crossings.
She has a PhD (UNSW) and has been facilitating and teaching creative writing workshops for all ages within communities as well as at schools and in the university sector for many years.