Namita Gokhale is an award winning writer and festival director. She is the author of eleven works of fiction and has written extensively on myth as well as the Himalayan region. Her acclaimed debut novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion, was published in 1984. Her recent novel Jaipur Journals, published in January 2020, was set against the backdrop of the vibrant Jaipur Literature Festival. Betrayed By Hope, a play on the life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, was also published in 2020.


A co-founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, Gokhale is committed to supporting translations and curating literary dialogues across languages and cultures. She was conferred the Centenary National Award for Literature by the Asam Sahitya Sabha in Guwahati in 2017. She won the Sushila Devi Literature Award for her novel Things to Leave Behind, which also received the Best Fiction Jury Award at the Valley of Words Literature Festival 2017, and was on the longlist for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award. The Blind Matriarch is her twentieth book.

Malashri Lal has been professor in the English Department, and former Dean, University of Delhi. She has published seventeen books, including The Law of the Threshold: Women Writers in Indian English, Tagore and the Feminine, Chamba-Achamba: Women’s Oral Narratives. She has coedited three books with Namita Gokhale, In Search of Sita: Revisiting Mythology, Finding Radha: The Quest for Love, and Betrayed by Hope: A Play on the Life of Michael Madhusudan Duttwhich received the Kalinga Fiction Award. Lal’s latest book is Mandalas of Time: Poems(2023). She has received research and writing fellowships at Harvard University, Bellagio, and Newcastle. She is currently Convener, English Advisory Board of the Sahitya Akademi. Among other recognitions, Malashri Lal has received the Maharani Gayatri Devi Award for Women’s Excellence.