We are delighted to continue our ongoing partnership with the University of Liverpool’s Department for New and International Writing, and to present an event with their current Writer in Residence, Meena Kandasamy.

Meena Kandasamy is a feminist poet, author and translator. Her debut collection of poems, Touch, was themed around caste and untouchability, and her second, Ms Militancy, was an explosive, feminist retelling/reclaiming of Tamil and Hindu myths. Her critically acclaimed first (anti)novel, The Gypsy Goddess, smudged the line between powerful fiction and fearsome critique in narrating the 1968 massacre of forty-four landless untouchable men, women and children striking for higher wages in the village of Kilvenmani, Tanjore in southern India. Her latest auto-fictional novel, When I Hit You: Or, The Portrait of the Writer As A Young Wife, drew upon her own experience within an abusive marriage, to lift the veil on the silence that surrounds domestic violence and marital rape. It was listed as one of the best books of 2017 by the Guardian, Observer, Daily Telegraph and Financial Times. She has been shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize, the Hindu Literature Prize and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Dylan Thomas International Prize. Her essays have appeared in Al Jazeera, Financial Times, Newsweek Middle-East and elsewhere. She lives in East London.

Preti Taneja’s debut novel We That Are Young (Galley Beggar Press) is a fierce and poetic translation of Shakespeare’s King Lear into contemporary India. In 2018 it has been longlisted for the Jhalak Prize, the Folio Prize and the Desmond Elliot Prize for best first novel, and shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize. Preti was born in the UK and after a decade working for charities and international NGOs, now writes and teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies and at the Centre for Human Rights in Practice at Warwick University. Preti is also the co-founder of advocacy collective ERA Films, and of Visual Verse, the anthology of art and words.

They will be in conversation with The White Review contributing editor Sandeep Parmar.

Tickets can be bought from The Bluecoat’s website. There will be cocktails.