Bio

Dr Meena Kandasamy FRSL is a poet, novelist, translator and anti-caste activist. She has written ten books — four novels, three collections of poetry, two works of non-fiction and a translation of the Tirukkural.

Her writing deconstructs trauma and violence while spotlighting the militant resistance against caste, gender, colonial and state oppression. For her, language is a radioactive site of struggle and collective imagination: the words that regiment the body to enforce caste codes, patriarchal policing and colonialist regulation can be hurled back, ready to detonate, turned against these systems.

The Independent called her “a one-woman, agitprop literary-political movement … It would take Carol Ann Duffy, Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie to match her infinite variety”; The Guardian, “one of fiction’s most fiery and unclassifiable polemicists.” For The Paris Review, “her prose is electric, at once brave and poetic and satirical”; India Today finds her “building a spiky, angular, fiercely singular corpus.”

Her latest novel, Fieldwork as a Sex Object (2026), follows a young Indian woman in London whose life is upended by a viral deepfake. Published by Brazen, HarperCollins India and Soft Skull, it was Spotify’s Book of the Month for July 2026 and one of Lit Hub’s 34 Books You Need to Read This Fall.

In January 2026 she co-curated, with Nimmi Gowrinathan, The Eelam Dialogues: Voices of Resistance at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Her op-eds and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, the Financial Times, Al Jazeera, India Today and The Hindu, among many others, and her Frontline cover story on Bastar appeared in 2025. She is the 2026 Villa Swagatam laureate at La Maison de la Poésie de Nantes.

A Wise One, A Warrior (2025), for Diaphanes’ Objects Talk Back series, reads caste and class into a seventeenth-century ivory sculpture of lovers from Tamil Nadu. In 2023 she published Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You, a decade of political poetry, and The Book of Desire, a feminist translation of the love poetry of the Tirukkural — only the second by a woman in two thousand years. The same year she co-edited Varavara Rao: A Life in Poetry.

In 2022 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received PEN Germany’s Hermann Kesten Prize as “a fearless fighter for democracy, human rights and the free word.” The Orders Were to Rape You (2021) grew from an unmade documentary about the women fighters of the Tamil Eelam struggle. Her translation of Salma’s Women, Dreaming won an English PEN Translates award and was longlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award.

When I Hit You (2017) was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Jhalak Prize and The Hindu Prize, and named a book of the year by The Guardian, The Observer, The Telegraph, the Financial Times and The Irish Times. Exquisite Cadavers (2019) made her third consecutive longlisting for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Her first novel, The Gypsy Goddess (2014), about the Kilvenmani massacre of 1968, was The Independent’s debut of the year and shortlisted for the Tata Literature First Book Award.

She began as a poet, with Touch (2006), introduced by Kamala Das, and Ms Militancy (2010), now a feminist cult classic in South Asia. At eighteen she edited The Dalit; at nineteen she published her first translation. For nearly twenty-five years since, she has translated from the Tamil — six further books, from the Dalit Panther leader Thol. Thirumavalavan and the rationalist Periyar to Salma and a generation of Tamil women poets — while her own work has been translated into twenty-seven languages. She has played the female lead in the Malayalam film Oraalppokkam and performed at Haus der Kunst, Munich, and at the March Meeting in Sharjah.

She holds a PhD in sociolinguistics and lives in Chennai. She has two sons.