Meena Kandasamy is a poet, writer, activist and translator. Her work maintains a focus on caste annihilation, linguistic identity and feminism. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms Militancy (2010). Her first novel, The Gypsy Goddess was published by Atlantic Books (UK) and HarperCollins India in 2014. She was a British Council - Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent and a Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University in 2011. In 2009, she was a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP). She has held writing residencies at the Hong Kong Baptist University, Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) and the University of Hyderabad. She has co-authored (with M Nisar) a biography of Kerala’s foremost Dalit revolutionary Ayyankali, and previously, she edited ‘The Dalit’, a bi-monthly English magazine. She holds a PhD in socio-linguistics from Anna University Chennai, and dabbles in political & literary translation.