Distinguished novelist and story teller, feminist and activist Githa Hariharan’s published work includes novels, short stories, essays, newspaper articles and columns. Her first novel, The Thousand Faces of Night (1992) won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book in 1993. Her other novels include The Ghosts of Vasu Master (1994), When Dreams Travel (1999), In Times of Siege (2003), Fugitive Histories (2009) and I Have Become the Tide (2019). A collection of highly acclaimed short stories, The Art of Dying, was published in 1993, and a book of stories for children, The Winning Team, in 2004. Her collection of essays, Almost Home: Cities and Other Places, was published in 2014. She has also edited a volume of stories in English translation from four major South Indian languages, A Southern Harvest (1993), co-edited a collection of stories for children, Sorry, Best Friend! (1997), a collection of essays entitled From India to Palestine: Essays in Solidarity (2014), and co-edited Battling for India: A Citizen’s Reader (2019). Her fiction has been translated into a number of languages including French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Greek, Urdu and Vietnamese; her essays and fiction have also been included in anthologies such as Salman Rushdie’s Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997. She has, over the years, been a cultural commentator through her essays, lectures and activism.
In 1995, Githa Hariharan challenged the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act as discriminatory against women. The case, Githa Hariharan and Another vs. Reserve Bank of India and Another, led to a landmark Supreme Court judgment in 1999 on guardianship.
Content Highlights: Githa Hariharan MBIFL 2020
