MENKA SHIVDASANI

About

MENKA SHIVDASANI

Picture credits: Namrata Shivdasani

Menka Shivdasani, a Mumbai-based writer, has five collections of poetry, Nirvana at
Ten Rupees, Stet, Safe House, Frazil (1980 – 2017) and The Seven Queens: Sindhi
Folktales Retold in English Verse.
Menka is co-translator of Freedom and Fissures (Sahitya Akademi), an anthology of
Sindhi Partition Poetry, and the editor of an anthology of women’s writing brought out
by Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW) in 2014. She
has also edited The BigBridge Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry, which originally
appeared online as two anthologies on the American e-zine http://www.bigbridge.org.
Menka has collaborated with Mohan Gehani, a senior Sindhi poet, on three books.
These include his poetry collections in English translation, Brittle Ice (Copper Coin,
2015) and While Sowing Dreams (Black and White Fountain, 2021). Their book,
Love Is the Only Finality: Sachal Sarmast (Sahitya Akademi), is forthcoming.

Menka’s poems have appeared in several publications, both in India and elsewhere,
and her work has been represented in the SYBA English Literature textbook of the
University of Mumbai. Her awards include the Ethos Literary Award 2019 and the
inaugural WE Eunice de Souza Award 2020. Her poetry collection Frazil was
shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize, and recognised for its
‘excellent contribution to literature’. Her poem, A Tale of the Mountains: A Sindhi
Folktale Revisited, has been made into a short film by noted director Susheel
Gajwani.

Menka’s work has been translated into several languages, including Sindhi, Hindi,
Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalam, Nepalese, Korean and Russian. She has been
organising annual poetry festivals since 2011 for the global movement 100 Thousand
Poets for Change. In 1986, she played a key role in founding the Poetry Circle in
Mumbai. In March 2023, she was named co-Chair, Asia-Pacific Writers and
Translators (APWT).

Her work as a journalist includes 18 books as co-author/editor with Raju Kane, three
of which were launched by the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Buy Menka’s Books:

Frazil 1980-2017 (Amazon, Paperwall)

Safe House (Amazon, Paperwall)

While Sowing Dreams (Amazon)

If The Roof Leaks, Let It Leak (Sparrow)

The Seven Queens: Sindhi Folktales Retold in English Verse (Amazon)

The BigBridge Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry (Amazon)