Margaret Mascarenhas is a multi-lingual and transnational writer, consulting editor, and an independent curator of Indo-American origin with a background in comparative literature at UC Berkeley. She received her training in Indian Art from art historian Dr Saryu Doshi, with whom she worked as an assistant editor for several years at Marg, and subsequently as a consulting editor. She is the author of the diaspora novel, Skin (Penguin India 2001), which is being taught in many colleges and universities and is highlighted in numerous academic papers on post-colonial literature in India, Portugal and the USA. Recently, Skin became a part of the discourse at a conference at Yale, “Goa: a post-colonial society between cultures” where the author was a keynote speaker and coordinator. Her second novel, The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (Hachette USA 2009), set in Venezuela, where she grew up, was the recipient of a Publishers Lunch award and was a Barnes and Noble Discover Pick in literary fiction.
She has contributed literary essays to numerous journals and anthologies, which include Coloquio Letras, the literary magazine of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Portugal, edited by the poet and literary critic Nuno Judice. She was the founding Director of Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts through 2011, and remains as the Convenor of its advisory board. She is currently the Founder and Director of the Blue Shores Prison Art Project at the Central Jail, Aguada in Goa, where she teaches a 4-year curriculum of poetry, performance art and visual art that explores the relationships of image, movement and text, and the ways in which they function, independently and inter-relatedly, in the creative process to express and/or elicit emotion. Although she has been writing poetry and sketching for over 20 years as part of her daily journaling regime, Triage–casualties of love and sex (Harper Collins India 2013), is her first published collection of poetry, spoken word poetry, flash memoir and sketches. Mascarenhas lives most of the year in Goa, where she has ancestral roots, and where she maintains a residency in the picturesque village of Calvim for working artists and writers from all over India.
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