About
K Srilata (Srilata Krishnan) is a poet, fiction writer, translator and academic. Her books include This Kind of Child: The `Disability’ Story (Westland) and seven collections of poetry, including Footnotes to the Mahabharata (Westland/Context), Three Women in a Single-Room House (Sahitya Akademi) and The Unmistakable Presence of Absent Humans (Poetrywala, Mumbai).
Srilata has also edited the anthologies The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry, Short Fiction from South India (OUP), All the Worlds Between: A Collaborative Poetry Project Between India and Ireland (Yoda), Lifescapes: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers from Tamilnadu (Women Unlimited) and The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History (Zubaan).
Srilata’s novel Table for Four (Penguin, India) was long listed in 2009 for the Man Asian literary prize. Her published translations include the works of the Tamil writers Vatsala (Once there was a Girl and The Scent of Happiness) and Salma (i, Salma).
Srilata’s poems have been widely anthologized and feature in collections such as The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry, A Poem a Day, Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English and The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City.
Srilata was awarded the Fulbright fellowship, the Charles Wallace fellowship and a foundation project by the India Foundation for the Arts. She has been writer in residence at the University of Stirling, Scotland, at the Yeonhui Art Space, Seoul and at Sangam House, India. Srilata was commissioned by the Goethe-Institut, Chennai in cooperation with the Chennai Photo Biennale to be a part of their Feminist Poets’ Summit project.
The Madras Players performed dramatized readings of Srilata’s poems from “Footnotes to the Mahabharata” at various venues in Chennai . Srilata was part of a collaborative art and poetry project “Held: Lockdown in Words and Images” (https://projectheld.wordpress.com/authors/k-srilata/) supported by the Goethe Institut in 2020. She co-curates the CMI Arts Initiative (https://www.cmi.ac.in//activities/arts-initiative.php). Her poems have been translated into Tamil, Hindi and Korean.
Formerly a Professor of Literature at IIT Madras, Srilata has taught courses and workshops in Creative Writing at various institutes and universities including at the Chennai Mathematical Institute and Ahmedabad University. She is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor at Shiv Nadar University, Chennai.
Newly launched book
Poetry
Footnotes to the Mahabharata
In Footnotes to the Mahabharata, K. Srilata draws readers into the inner worlds of some of the Mahabharata’s most feisty women – Alli, Hidimbi, Draupadi, Gandhari and Kunti. Drawing inspiration from a range of sources within the Mahabharata canon, the five poetic sequences which constitute the book are shaped around what remains unexamined or invisible within most tellings.
