Only two weeks left to submit to Asymptote’s first-ever Special Feature on Contemporary Indian Language Literature in English Translation!
Since we first announced the Feature in August, we have received some very exciting work from all across the Indian map. And we can’t wait to find more voices, because in a country so large, we know there are more out there.
Take advantage of these last two weeks to revise your best translations and send them in!
Our Indian Language Literature Special Feature draws upon regional political currents—ever since India’s last general election in 2014, the country has been subsumed by heated political arguments about the rights and systematic persecution of minorities and minoritized voices. Writers have been victims as well as dissidents in this conflict: Karnataka and Maharashtra saw targeted attacks on “rationalist” and Dalit writers, and in Tamil Nadu a writer publicly declared (until recently resurfacing) that he’d given up writing, when his book was met with right-wing demands for censorship. And across the country, from Punjab to Gujarat to Kerala, writers returned their national honors in protest.
This Feature’s goal is to celebrate the diversity and dissent within Indian writing, while creating a space for the ideas and literary talent of those writers that have been historically marginalized by India’s largely patriarchal, nationalist, and caste-based narrative.
We are accepting poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama translated into English from any Indian language, on any topic, by any active writer who resists or is excluded from this narrative due to caste, gender, sexuality, religion, or geography.
We especially welcome writing from outside the metropolises and from regions of conflict that dispute inclusion in the Indian nation state.
You can find the complete submission guidelines here.
Have you translated work by any contemporary Indian language writer? Do you think there’s a writer whose work needs to be shared with English language readers? Then don’t just sit on your translations—send them our way! We want to read them all!
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