Poetry by Kiriti Sengupta: ‘Death pauses verdict; the authority mars evidence. / The doomed is put on the pyre; rallies slit through / the silence.’

“I was chasing this desire to pin down the inexplicable when I wrote Mad Sisters, but acknowledge that it is inexplicable. It sort-of grew in the novel, intwining with the cosmos and the idea of the sublime, and how the interpersonal is the tether that keeps us sane—and perhaps caged.” By Akankshya Abismruta

The collection Awaaz: Voices of Govandi has emerged from the need of the people of Govandi to reclaim the narrative about their neighbourhood, and carve out their own future. Here is an excerpt from the collection. Edited by Nisha Nair-Gupta

Poetry by Vrinda Bansal: ‘I am rage and blasphemy, God in a dungeon, / a domesticated wolf, the brain of a terrorist party / I am your grandmother’s birthday party and a child’s funeral, / a barrel of kerosene’

From Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Lagaa, Badhai Do, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, and more, a fresh lease of life seems to have been granted to a responsible on-screen LGBTQIA+ representation in the glitzy-verse of commercial Bollywood over the past decade. By Nivedita Dey

Poetry by Smita Agarwal: ‘The dahlias grow hawa mey— / off the air, we’d say / Down steep ravines / into which the monsoon // munificence would flow’

K. Vaishali won the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar this year for her memoir Homeless: Growing Up Lesbian and Dyslexic in India. She speaks about this latest honour, inclusivity in Indian publishing, and the challenges of revealing the sensitive parts of her life to the world. By Namrata

Fiction by Neera Kashyap: ‘The next week he, Paltu, joined the moulis. To gather honey, to pay off debts, to induce his mother to eat two meals again, to oil her hair, to soap her body, to close the door to their hut. For his father had gone, and would never return.’

Poetry by Gopi Kottoor: ‘And then, the sip / From the spoon / That’ll soon become memory, / That slowly drawn inward kiss’

Indian urban centres are getting hotter every year due to the heat island effect. With millions of lives at stake, urgent city-planning measures are needed across the country to mitigate the incoming crisis. By Vipin Labroo

Told through the prism of a Shakesperean comedy of errors and mistaken identities, Kiran Rao’s Laapata Ladies (2024) explores the various paths to female self-determination in rural India. By Karan Madhok

Poems by Sayan Aich Bhowmik: ‘I have been told the entire cosmos of our being / Hair, skin, Tissues / Renew themselves. / The old ones dissolving in air, without pain / Much like ice melting on the kitchen shelf.’