When the body becomes a battlefield, how does the act of writing serve as testimony, resistance, and memory? Writer and activist Meena Kandasamy delves into the brutal and necessary work of documenting political violence. She will discuss the ethics of bearing witness through site-specific reportage on the Kilvenmani massacre, the testimonies of female insurgents in the Eelam liberation struggle, the Dharmapuri anti-Dalit atrocity, and the ongoing militarisation in Bastar.

Described by the Independent as a ‘one-woman, agit-prop literary-political movement’, Meena Kandasamy is a poet, writer, translator, anti-caste activist and academic based in India.

Over twenty years, her writing has addressed state and structural violence and people's militant resistance against caste, gender and ethnic oppressions. Her extensive 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.’

She holds a PhD in sociolinguistics and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages.