Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 12 hours ago
Award-winning poet and writer Arundhathi Subramaniam’s acclaimed recent work, Women Who Wear Only Themselves and The Gallery of Upside-Down Women, celebrate the voices of women mystics – contemporary and historical, familiar and long-forgotten. Wandering through these pages are some extraordinary women, women who vault over borders, walk naked, walk aslant, and sometimes, upside down. They remind us how to retain our spine through life’s giddiest roller-coaster rides. Prose and poetry blend in this conversation around audacious women, who interrogate faith and gender, even as they embody lives of bewilderment, insight and startling freedom. In conversation with academic and author Nalini Iyer.
Arundhathi Subramaniam is a leading Indian poet and writer. Her books include the recent prose work on contemporary female sacred travelers, Women Who Wear Only Themselves, and the new poetry collection, The Gallery of Upside Down Women. Other works include an anthology on women mystic poets, Wild Women, and the bestselling biography, Sadhguru: More Than a Life. Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2015, she is the winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award 2020, the Khushwant Singh Poetry Prize, the Raza Award, and the Mahakavi Kanhaiyalal Sethia Award, the Il Ceppo Award in Italy, among several others.
Nalini Iyer is Professor of English at Seattle University. She teaches courses in postcolonial South Asian and African writing, diaspora studies, and transnational feminisms. She is the author/editor of five books on South Asian studies including: Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India; Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest; Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays in Memory, Culture, and Politics; Teaching Anglophone South Asian Diasporic Literature; and In the Shadow of Partition: Seventy-Five Years and Beyond. She has also published articles in ARIEL , South Asian Review, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. She is the Chief Editor of South Asian Review.
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#women #womenempowerment #literature
Award-winning poet and writer Arundhathi Subramaniam’s acclaimed recent work, Women Who Wear Only Themselves and The Gallery of Upside-Down Women, celebrate the voices of women mystics – contemporary and historical, familiar and long-forgotten. Wandering through these pages are some extraordinary women, women who vault over borders, walk naked, walk aslant, and sometimes, upside down. They remind us how to retain our spine through life’s giddiest roller-coaster rides. Prose and poetry blend in this conversation around audacious women, who interrogate faith and gender, even as they embody lives of bewilderment, insight and startling freedom. In conversation with academic and author Nalini Iyer.
Arundhathi Subramaniam is a leading Indian poet and writer. Her books include the recent prose work on contemporary female sacred travelers, Women Who Wear Only Themselves, and the new poetry collection, The Gallery of Upside Down Women. Other works include an anthology on women mystic poets, Wild Women, and the bestselling biography, Sadhguru: More Than a Life. Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2015, she is the winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award 2020, the Khushwant Singh Poetry Prize, the Raza Award, and the Mahakavi Kanhaiyalal Sethia Award, the Il Ceppo Award in Italy, among several others.
Nalini Iyer is Professor of English at Seattle University. She teaches courses in postcolonial South Asian and African writing, diaspora studies, and transnational feminisms. She is the author/editor of five books on South Asian studies including: Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India; Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest; Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays in Memory, Culture, and Politics; Teaching Anglophone South Asian Diasporic Literature; and In the Shadow of Partition: Seventy-Five Years and Beyond. She has also published articles in ARIEL , South Asian Review, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. She is the Chief Editor of South Asian Review.
Follow us on –
Website - jlflitfest.org
Facebook - facebook.com/JLFInternational
YouTube - youtube.com/@JLFInternational
Instagram - instagram.com/jlfinternational
Twitter - twitter.com/JLFLitfest
#women #womenempowerment #literature
