Our Story

Shinie Antony

Festival Director

Shinie Antony is a writer and editor based in Bengaluru. Her novels include Eden Abandoned: The Story of Lilith, Can’t, The Girl Who Couldn’t Love. Her short-story collections include Barefoot and Pregnant and The Orphanage for Words. She has put together the anthologies Boo, Why We Don’t Talk, An Unsuitable Woman. She is the founder of Bangalore Literature Festival. Her story ‘A Dog’s Death’ won the Commonwealth Short Story Asia prize in 2002.

Maitreyee B Chowdhury

Organizing Team

Maitreyee B Chowdhury is a poet and writer. She has four books to her credit, The Hungryalists , One Dozen-Hasan Azizul Huq( Trans) , Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen- Bengali Cinema's First Couple and Where Even The Present Is Ancient: Benaras. Maitreyee is the editor of The Bangalore Review- a literary magazine, her work has been vastly anthologised. Her forthcoming work is centered around the eccentric poet genius Binoy Majumdar. She can be found at https://www.maitreyeechowdhury.com/

Amruta Dongray

Organizing Team – Workshops Coordinator

Armed with a Master's degree in Sociology from the Bombay University, Amruta Dongray worked in the tourism industry for eight years. She continues to work full-time as a mother to two human and three canine children. She considers herself as an "accidental poet". She started writing poetry in 2010. Her first book PASTPRESENT saw its release in 2013. Her second collection of poetry Three Halves was released in 2018. Her poems are her take on the dynamics in society and are generally very short. She now also enjoys writing longer poems which read like stories. She co-hosts an evening of poetry every month at Atta Galatta.

Prashant Sankaran

Organizing Team

Prashant Sankaran stepped off the hectic corporate treadmill after 25 years on it to mentor small entrepreneurs and serve on the advisory boards of a few not-for-profit and for-profit organisations.Currently he is the Executive Director at Interweave Consulting, a firm focussed on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion solutions. He also dabbles in photography, performing arts and filmmaking. He is the author of Home, a fusion between poetry and graphic novel and a children’s book Tutu Plays Hide and Seek. His works combining photography and haikus have been exhibited at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore and the Bangalore International Centre.

Sourav Roy

Organizing Team

Sourav is a poet, translator and educator. He currently works at Head Start Educational Academy, Bengaluru. His published books include Kaal Baisakhi (Poetry collection, Vani Prakashan), Karnakavita (Editor: Anthology of Hindi-Urdu poetry from Bengaluru, Atta Galatta), Soho Mein Marx (Translator: Three Plays by Howard Zinn, Rajkamal Prakashan), Os Ki Prithvi (Translation of Japanese Haiku, Vani Prakashan), and Teen Natak (Editor, plays by Abhishek Majumdar, Bloomsbury).

Vikram Sridhar

Organizing Team – Children’s Coordinator

Vikram Sridhar is a Performance Storyteller and Theatre Practitioner. His stories, Performance and workshops for Children, Adults and Families are rooted in Heritage, Ecology and Folklore deeply inspired from various communities of the soil . Based in Chennai and Bangalore, he has travelled the country extensively with his Desi way of Storytelling.

Shikha Malaviya

Organizing Team

Shikha Malaviya (www.shikhamalaviya.com) is an Indo-American poet & writer. Her book, Geography of Tongues, was published in December 2013 and featured in several literary festivals. Shikha is a co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a literary press dedicated to new poetic voices from India. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in Prairie Schooner, Chicago Quarterly Review, TAB-The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Drunken Boat & other fine journals. Shikha was a featured TEDx speaker in GolfLinks, Bangalore, in 2013, where she gave a talk on poetry. She has been a two-time mentor for AWP's Writer to Writer Mentorship Program & was selected as Poet Laureate of San Ramon, CA, 2016. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area, but calls Bengaluru home.

Lakshmi and Subodh

Co-Founders

Subodh and Lakshmi are co-founders of Atta Galatta, a Bengaluru-based bookstore with a focus on Indian, vernacular writing and is a venue for literary, art and cultural events. Since its inception 13 years ago, the bookstore has hosted over 2000 events, including book launches, poetry readings, theatre performances, art shows, screenings, storytelling sessions and workshops. Every year, Atta Galatta has the immense pleasure of being able to felicitate the best and brightest of the Indian writers’ community. In association with the Bangalore Literature Festival, a platform for voices from all over India and the globe, we have been striving to commemorate literary achievements with the Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize. Instituted in 2015, the annual award are presented under 7 categories of Fiction (English), Non-Fiction (English), Popular Choice, Best Cover Design and 2 new categories instituted in 2021, Best Young Adult Book and Best Children’s Book: Picture Book. An annual award is presented for Literary Achievement in Kannada to an author, celebrating their body of work and contribution to the language. Atta Galatta has ventured into publishing, has published seven books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and an anthology of humour stories and a children's book.

Akhila Krishnamurthy

Organizing Team

Akhila Krishnamurthy is a freelance journalist, founder of Aalaap, a boutique arts management company based in Chennai and Director of Communications at Krea University. Akhila founded Aalaap after a 15-year career in journalism where she worked across leading publications in India, including The Times of India where she was the Editor of all the supplements. As a freelance writer, Akhila has contributed essays and features across The Hindu, the India Today Group, Outlook, Tehelka, Open, Elle and Harper's Bazaar. Aalaap is Akhila's brainchild and is an ideas and innovations company that works with classical artistes from across the world across aspects of ideation, curation, production, publicity and strategy. Personally, she is passionate about artistes and the world they inhabit, and is constantly investigating the many shifts that make it so dynamic and exciting. She is a mother of a seven-year-old and has spoken at TEDxNapierBridge on her two babies - Aryan and Aalaap - and how the principles of parenting and that of entrepreneurship, in a sense, mirror each other. She is also the winner of the Original Idea of the Year award from Femina and the Woman Entrepreneur of the Year at the Startpreneurs by the CII.