Event: Walking Towards Ourselves - Women in India

HARDIE GRANT BOOKS AND APWT INVITE YOU TO A
CONVERSATION ABOUT WOMEN IN INDIA

That’s what the press tells us – but what is it really like to be a woman living in India? 
In 2012, a young medical student was brutally gang-raped on a bus in New Delhi. The crime was so horrific that it made international headlines. In India, it sparked a gender revolution. Thousands of women stormed the streets in unprecedented protests, demanding that rape laws be reviewed and conditions be made safer for them. What, if anything, has changed for women since then? Is India really ‘no place for a woman,’ as claimed by ML Sharma, the defence attorney for one of the attackers, in the documentary India’s Daughter? 

India’s finest women writers have contributed incredible accounts of their lives to the anthology 
Walking Towards Ourselves: Indian women tell their stories 
(Hardie Grant Books, 2016).

Join three of the contributors – Rosalyn D’Mello, Sharanya Manivannan and Salma – in conversation with Jane Camens to find out what it’s like to be a woman in India at this time of cataclysmic change.

Date: Monday 8 August, 6–7.30 pm

Venue: QCA Lecture Theatre and Gallery, Queensland College of Art, 226 Grey Street, South Bank 4101

Price: Free entry

Bookings: Essential by Friday, 5 August to Hardie Grant Books - publicity@hardiegrant.com.au

Rosalyn D’Mello’s memoir A Handbook For My Lover (Hardie Grant Books, 2016) has drawn critical acclaim and comparisons with Anais Nin’s work. She is an art writer and was nominated for Forbes’ Best Emerging Art Writer Award in 2014 and the inaugural Prudential Eye Art Award for Best Writing on Asian Contemporary Art in 2014.

Salma is a political activist for the cause of women’s empowerment, and a writer of Tamil poetry and fiction. She has published two volumes of poetry and her novel The Hour Past Midnight, which revolves around the lives of women in a Muslim community of rural Tamil Nadu, was longlisted for the Man Asia Literary prize. 

Sharanya Manivannan’s first book Witchcraft (Bullfighter Books, 2008) was described in The Straits Times, Singapore, as ‘sensuous and spiritual, delicate and dangerous’. She was specially commissioned to write and perform a poem at the 2015 Commonwealth Day Observance at Westminster Abbey, London, to an audience that included the British Royal Family. 

Jane Camens is the Executive Director of Asia Pacific Writers & Translators (APWT), an association that welcomes members from around our region (including Australia). Jane co-edited Griffith Review’s ‘New Asia Now’ issue, and she has won several international literary awards for her own short stories, including the Fish Publishing Short Story Prize in Ireland and the Script Road Short Story Competition, Macau.