Distinguished founder – Arpita Das – of award winning, independent publishing house, Yoda Press, will be officially opening Ananke’s Women in Literature Festival 2024 on April 23rd, 2024. The title of the keynote is : Kindness as Intelligence In The Academy and Creative Industries.
Arpita Das is an alumna of St Stephen’s College, Delhi University and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, for which she received the Felix Scholarship. She is the Founder-Publisher of the award-winning independent publishing house based in New Delhi, Yoda Press. She teaches the Publishing Seminar to senior students of Creative Writing at Ashoka University and a Foundation Course called Introduction to Critical Thinking to first-year students. In the past, she helped set up the Word Lab at the Indian Institute of Human Settlements in Bangalore, and led the Sage School of Publishing courses at various universities and institutions across India. A Board Member of PublisHer (womeninpublishing.org), she writes often on book culture, publishing, popular culture, gender and bibliotherapy for various periodicals and platforms. She is also the Editor of the South Asia Series at Melbourne University Publishing.
Talking about her participation, Arpita said: “I look forward to Ananke’s Women in Literature Festival every year because it feels like home. The possibilities it suggests have been borne out over and over again for me in the form of new friendships and collaborations.”
Happening in the month of World Book Day, the three-day event strives to create a space, a collective, where a diverse set of voices – especially from the Global South – can come together to share their thoughts, vision, and lived experiences with agency.
Taking cue from the current global status quo, events, rhetoric and narratives emerging from across the world, Language and Erasure has been selected as the main theme of the festival. This decision was finalized after conversations with the festival team as well as other stakeholders involved.
Ananke’s Women in Literature Festival 2024 aims to mobilize change by initiating dialogue across language, politics, and socio-cultural boundaries. Over the past decade, humankind has seen the world grapple with increasing division, de-sensitization, and lack of compassion. Traditional and new media has played a pivotal role in amplifying such polarization through its use of propaganda, warped and divisive optics, and manipulative messaging.
Together at the festival, questions will be asked as to what we mean by ‘human’. With this vision in mind, AnankeWLF’s 2024 invites individuals, communities and peoples of the world to attend the digital festival to imagine change.
A collective endeavor, Ananke’s Women in Literature Festival is produced in partnership with (in alphabetical order) Ala Books and Authors, BookBot, eShe, Kitaab, Keemiya Creatives, Nadja Media, Neem Tree Press, Readomania, Reverie Publishers, Seagull Books, Trace Magazine, Yoda Press, Zubaan Books, and Zuka Books. Ananke’s Women in Literature Foundation’s advisors include Zubaan Books’ Urvashi Butalia, Seagull Books’ Naveen Kishore, Yoda Press’s Arpita Das, Neem Tree Press’s Archna Sharma, author, poet, translator Naima Rashid and Perera Hussein’s Ameena Hussein.
Get in touch for more information: Media@anankemag.com
Session Title: Kindness as Intelligence In The Academy and Creative Industries
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