SALT is delighted to announce our first cohort of translation mentees as part of the American Literary Translators Association’s Emerging Translator Mentorship Program. These emerging translators will be working directly with experienced translators, who have agreed to guide their mentees on a single project.
- Bangla: Arunava Sinha is mentoring Sritama Halder
- Hindi: Daisy Rockwell is mentoring Aditya Vikram Shrivastava
- Malayalam: Jayasree Kalathil is mentoring Ananthu Sunil
- Nepali: Manjushree Thapa is mentoring Rachel Moles
- Panjabi: Nirupama Dutt is mentoring Ammara Ahmed
- Tamil: N. Kalyan Raman is mentoring Subhashree Beeman
- Urdu: Musharraf Ali Farooqi is mentoring Poorna Swami
- Non-language-specific poetry: Khairani Barokka is mentoring Thila Varghese
The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) has been matching mentors and mentees since 2015. The mentorship features a trip to the annual ALTA conference in Autumn 2024, at which the mentees’ read from their projects, and a trip to the London Book Fair in Spring 2025. This cohort will be followed by three more 2025-27, for a total of 24 mentorships.
Thanks and congratulations to all our participants:
Bangla: Arunava Sinha is mentoring Sritama Halder.
Sritama Halder is the Reading Facilitator at a Kolkata-based high school by day and a translator by night. As the Reading Facilitator, her job is to initiate her students into book-reading. As a translator, she translates academic articles from English to Bangla for CASI, University of Pennsylvania. Learn more about Sritama here.
Arunava Sinha is a literary translator, working from Bengali into English and English into Bengali. More than 80 of his translations have been published so far across India, the UK, the US, and Australia. He teaches in the Creative Writing Department of Ashoka University in India, and is Co-Director, Ashoka Centre for Translation. He lives and works in New Delhi.
Hindi: Daisy Rockwell is mentoring Aditya Vikram Shrivastava.
Aditya Vikram is a writer, translator, and emerging scholar from Lucknow, India. Currently a teaching fellow in the English department at Ashoka University, they are interested in questions of language, regionality, postcolonialism, performance, and gender. Their critical and creative literary work has been published by Goethe Institute, British Council, Agents of Ishq, and Gulmohur Quarterly, among others. Learn more about Aditya here.
Daisy Rockwell is an artist and translator living in Vermont, USA. She has translated numerous twentieth century classics into English from Hindi and Urdu, including Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, and Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard. Her translation of Krishna Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There was awarded the 2019 Aldo and Jeannie Scaglioni for Translation of a Literary Work, and her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand was awarded the 2022 International Booker Prize as well as the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.
Malayalam: Jayasree Kalathil is mentoring Ananthu Sunil.
Ananthu Sunil is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in English, while working as a freelance translator on the side. Ananthu is also a rapper and songwriter, working hard to garner attention for his songs, which blend English and Malayalam lyrics. Learn more about Ananthu here.
Dr. Jayasree Kalathil is the author of The Sackclothman, a children’s book which has been translated into Malayalam, Telugu, and Hindi. She has received the V. Abdulla Memorial Translation Prize (for Sheela Tomy’s Valli), the JCB Prize for Literature (for S. Hareesh’s Moustache), and the Crossword Books Jury Award for Indian Language Translation (for N Prabhakaran’s Diary of a Malayali Madman). She has published widely in the area of anti-racism and human rights in mental health, including Recovery and Resilience: African, African-Caribbean and South Asian Women’s Stories and the co-authored textbook Values and Ethics in Mental Health. Originally from Kerala, India, Jayasree lives in the New Forest in England.
Nepali: Manjushree Thapa is mentoring Rachel Moles.
Rachel Moles is a novice translator from England who also writes and acts. She was based in Kathmandu, Nepal between 2012 and Covid, where she taught English, worked for development organizations, and made some forays into film and theatre. She will be translating a Nepali novel into English. Learn more about Rachel here.
Manjushree Thapa is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction centered on contemporary Nepal. She has also translated Nepali literature into English, most recently Indra Bahadur Rai’s modern classic There’s a Carnival Today, set in Darjeeling’s separatist movement. She translated the works of 49 Nepali poets and writers in The Country is Yours, and has guest edited collections of Nepali literature in translation for Manoa, La.Lit, and Words Without Borders. She has a Master’s in English from the University of Washington, where she was a Fulbright fellow, and a DLitt (Honorary) from Western University. She is currently working on a novel.
Panjabi: Nirupama Dutt is mentoring Ammara Ahmad.
Ammara Ahmad is a writer and journalist from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has appeared in Dawn, The Wire, Scroll, Quint, Indian Express and Malaysiakini. She is a language activist and has been actively promoting Panjabi, a dying language in Pakistan. She can be reached as @ammarawrites on Twitter. Learn more about Ammara here.
Nirupama Dutt is a well-known poet, journalist, columnist, and translator, writing in both English and Punjabi, as well as occasionally in Hindi. She received the Punjabi Akademi Award for her anthology of poems, Ik Nadi Sanwali Jahi (A Stream Somewhat Dark). Her poetry anthologies in English and Hindi are: The Black Woman and Buri Auraton Ki Fehrist Se. Her poems have been translated into many languages and included in several anthologies. Her books include Stories of the Soil (translation of 41 stories from Punjabi, published by Penguin) and Poet of the Revolution (translation of the memoirs and poetry of Lal Singh Dil, published by Penguin).
Tamil: N. Kalyan Raman is mentoring Subhashree Beeman.
Subhashree Beeman is a US-based literary and commercial translator working in the languages Tamil, French, Spanish, and English. She was born and raised in Chennai, India. Through the ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship, she will be translating her first book-length work from Tamil under the guidance of Mr. Kalyan Raman. Learn more about Subhashree here.
N. Kalyan Raman is a translator of Tamil fiction and poetry into English. He has published 15 works of translated fiction and over 200 poems by leading Tamil poets in journals and anthologies in India and abroad. The Story of a Goat, his translation of Perumal Murugan’s Poonachi, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2020. He was recipient of the Translation Prize (English) for 2022 given by the Central Academy of Letters in India. He lives and works in the port city of Chennai in south India.
Urdu: Musharraf Ali Farooqi is mentoring Poorna Swami.
Poorna Swami is a writer, poet, and choreographer from Bangalore, India. She received the 2018 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, and also the 2024 Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu translation. Currently, she is a PhD student in the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. Learn more about Poorna here.
Musharraf Ali Farooqi is an author, novelist, and translator. He is an international authority on Urdu classical literature, and the founder of the Library of Urdu Classics (urduclassics.com) and Urdu Thesaurus (urduthesaurus.com). He is also the founder of Storykit, a program that uses stories to educate children. More.
Poetry from a South Asian Language: Khairani Barokka is mentoring Thila Varghese.
Thila Varghese lives in Canada, where she works part time during the academic year as a Senior Writing Advisor at Western University. Her translations of Tamil literary works have been published in international journals and magazines. Thila’s translation entry was shortlisted in the 2023 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation. Learn more about Thila here.
Khairani Barokka is Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), and a writer and artist from Jakarta, with around twenty-five years of professional translation experience. Okka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and centers disability justice as anticolonial praxis, and access as translation. Among her honors, she has been MPT’s Inaugural Poet-in-Residence, a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, an Artforum Must-See, and Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing. Okka’s books include Indigenous Species, Rope, and Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (as co-editor). Her latest is Ultimatum Orangutan, shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.