Contemporary Voices from India: Novel Reading & Conversation Saskya Jain and Geetanjali Shree (LitFest 2025)

Two acclaimed Indian novelists, Saskya Jain and Geetanjali Shree, will read from their work and engage in a conversation about writing, memory, and the many Indias their fiction brings to life.

Saskya Jain’s Geeta Rahman at Championship Point (2021) tells the story of a young badminton prodigy in 1990s Delhi, coming of age in a rapidly liberalizing nation while grappling with personal grief and the echoes of Partition. With sharp and inventive prose, Jain explores the intimate entanglements of ambition, family, and history.

Geetanjali Shree, winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize for Tomb of Sand and currently fellow of the DAAD Berlin Artists Program, offers in this novel a bold, poetic narrative centered on an 80-year-old widow who rediscovers vitality after loss, befriends a transgender woman, and journeys across the border to confront the wounds of Partition.

Across generations and languages, Jain and Shree present two visions of contemporary India: one in English, the other in Hindi, one seen through the eyes of youth, the other through the wisdom of age.

Language: English, Hindi

Part of LitFest 2025 at Bard College Berlin

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Saskya Jain is a writer from New Delhi. She is the author of two novels, Fire Under Ash (Penguin Random House), shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt Prize, and Geeta Rahman at Championship Point (Simon & Schuster), nominated for the Times of India Author Award and the Tata Literature Live Book of the Year Award. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Intelligent Life, The Economist, The Caravan, The Baffler and DIE ZEIT, among others. Educated at Berlin’s Freie Universität and Columbia University, New York, she holds an MFA in Fiction from Boston University. She has taught creative writing and literature at Hong Kong University, Grinnell College and Dartmouth College, and has held writing residencies at Hedgebrook and Art Omi (USA), Sangam House (India) and Toji Cultural Centre (South Korea). She was the 2024 Dorothea Schlegel Artist in Residence at Freie Universität Berlin.

Geetanjali Shree, born in Mainpuri, India, is an acclaimed novelist, playwright, and literary theorist writing in Hindi and English. She is the author of five novels, including Mai, Hamara Shahar Us Baras (Our City That Year), and Ret Samadhi (Tomb of Sand, tr. Daisy Rockwell), which in 2022 became the first South Asian work to win the International Booker Prize and also received the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Her works, translated into numerous Indian and international languages, are known for their lyrical experimentation, linguistic play, and fearless exploration of memory, gender, and history. Shree is a founding member of the Delhi-based collective Vivadi, a working group of theatre makers, visual artists, film makers, and writers and has participated in international residencies and lectures worldwide. In 2025 she is DAAD Artist-in-Residence in Berlin. 

For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: Julie Johnson Kidd Hall (Waldstraße 15, 13156 Berlin)

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