Dr MEENA KANDASAMY (real name இளவேனில் Iḷavēṉil) was born in 1984 in Chennai. Her maternal grandparents were lower-caste Shudras who fell in love against social norms and left the country for Ethiopia where her mother, Vasantha, was born. They subsequently returned to India. Her father, Kandasamy, born in the nomadic tribe of Andi Pandaram in a tiny village in the Pudukottai District, was the first in his family, and village, to finish school, college, and university. He went on to receive a PhD in Tamil literature. He came from a landless family, and was himself of mixed-caste heritage. His father, Karuppiah was a witch-doctor, and the hereditary professions were fortune-telling and begging. Even today, the words Andi and Pandaram continue to be slur words in Tamil and Malayalam that denote ‘beggars’.

 

Meena's father grew up in an orphanage run by Kunrakudi Adigalar after his father abandoned the family. He was later as a young sub-editor in Madras arrested during the Emergency. Meena's parents’ marriage in 1981 was considered anti-caste and against caste (jaathi maruppu thirumanam). Her mother worked at IIT Madras for three decades as a faculty of mathematics, and from 1996 she led a legal battle for the implementation of the reservation policy for SC/ST/OBC and for her work to be recognised by a hostile Brahmin academia. Meena’s father taught Tamil language and literature for a time at the University of Madras. Their involvement in the anti-caste struggle led Meena to work alongside Dalit movements and it is a formative, definitive influence in all her work. 

 

In her late teens (2002) she was the editor of The Dalit, a short-lived bimonthly magazine “that provided a platform to record atrocities, condemn oppressive hierarchies and document the forgotten heritage." Subsequently, drawn by the militant ideology of the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (Liberation Panthers Party) which worked towards caste-annihilation, she translated the essays and speeches of its founder-leader Thol.Thirumavalavan into English: Talisman: Extreme Emotions of Dalit Liberation (2003), followed by Uproot Hindutva: The Fiery Voice of the Liberation Panthers (2004). In 2007, she translated Dravidian ideologue Periyar's feminist tract Penn Yaen Adimai Aanaal? (Why Were Women Enslaved?) and co-wrote the first English biography of Kerala's iconic Dalit leader Ayyankali.

 

Her debut collection of poems, Touch (2006) was themed around caste and untouchability -- and had a beautiful foreword by Kamala Das. Meena's second collection, Ms Militancy (2010) was an explosive, feminist retelling/reclaiming of Tamil and Hindu myths. 

 

Her first (anti)novel, The Gypsy Goddess, (2014) 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, Tamil Nadu. Her second novel, a work of auto-fiction, When I Hit You: Or, The Portrait of the Writer As A Young Wife (2017) drew upon her own experience within an abusive marriage, to lift the veil on the silence that surrounds domestic violence and marital rape in modern India. It was selected as book of the year by The Guardian, The Observer, Daily Telegraph and Financial Times; and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2018, among others. Her third novel, Exquisite Cadavers, a work of experimental fiction was published in November 2019, and like her other novels was longlisted for the Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize.

 

She co-taught a course on Feminist Writing as Social Activism: Perspectives from the Neocolonial World in Fall 2018 when she was Gallatin Global Faculty in Residence at the New York University (NYU). The same year, she received a PEN Translates award for her translation of Salma's Manamiyangal (Women, Dreaming; Titled Axis Press, Penguin-Randomhouse India, 2020).

 

In 2019-2020, she was lucky to be able to devote time and explore her non-fiction writing through an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) grant. This support enabled her to write two long-form essays exploring female militancy in the LTTE/ Eelam Tamil liberation struggle (The Orders Were to Rape You (The White Review) and The Poetry of Female Fighters (Guernica)). This culminated in her book of essays.  

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Her novels have been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Hindu Lit Prize. 

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Meena has been a fellow of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program (IWP-2009), a British Council Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent (2011) and a fellow of the Berlin-based Junge Akademie (AdK). 

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In 2022, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). The same year, in November, she 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.’ 

 

In 2023, she published her feminist-interventionist translation of the love poetry of the Tamil classical text Tirukkural, The Book of Desire. Her latest published work is Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You, a collection of political poetry written over the last decade. 

 

Her essays and op-eds have appeared in Al Jazeera, The New York Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, The White Review, Guernica, among other places. She holds a PhD in sociolinguistics from Anna University, Chennai (2010). She lives in Chennai--a city she loves and loves to hate--with her sons, a very talkative cat, an irrepressible dog and of course, her partner.

She is represented by David Godwin Literary Associates.