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.
