Meena Kandasamy
Author and poet
For twenty years, across three collections—Touch, Ms Militancy, and Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You—I have written into the intersections of caste, gender, self-determination and resistance. These poems carry the weight of struggles that transcend borders, and I believe they could resonate powerfully with French readers.
If I am lucky, I dream of working closely with a French translator who can capture not just the meaning but the militancy of my verses—the anger, the tenderness, the defiance that pulses through each line. Translation is transformation, and I want to discover what my poetry becomes when it breathes in French. If that collaboration proves elusive initially, I am equally committed to using this residency to write new work, to let the landscape and its revolutionary spirit infuse my poetry with fresh urgency and possibility.
Meena Kandasamy is a poet and writer based in Chennai. Over twenty years, her writing has addressed state and structural violence. Her corpus includes three poetry collections, Touch (2006), Ms Militancy (2010) and Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You (2023), as well as three novels, The Gypsy Goddess (2014), the Women's Prize short-listed When I Hit You (2017) and Exquisite Cadavers (2019). In 2022, she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was also awarded the PEN Hermann Kesten Prize for her writing and work as a 'fearless fighter for democracy, human rights and the free word.'
