Over the years, Poetry with Prakriti has brought you a wide mix of contemporary poets, well known and emerging, from India and abroad. Some of them are no longer with us, but not forgotten. As part of the ongoing online edition of the festival, the Prakriti Foundation is bringing you sessions devoted to their memory, with readings by poets, writers and other friends who knew them and their work well. The first of these is in honour of Margaret Mascarenhas, who left us in 2019.

Celebrating the writing of Margaret Mascarenhas

Margaret Mascarenhas was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, and lived in many parts of the world, including Venezuela, California in the USA, Bombay, and Goa, where part of her family has roots. She worked as correspondent, columnist, editor, lecturer, art critic, independent curator, novelist, and creative writing teacher. She was also an activist deeply invested in causes that affected Goa, where she made her home in the last years of her life. Also in Goa, she was founding director of the Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, and founding director of the Blue Shores Silent Prison Art programme. Fluently bilingual  — in English and Spanish  — she could also translate from Portuguese, French and Italian to English and was working on her Konkani and Hindi. Margaret wrote two novels, Skin and The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos, and Triage: Casualties of Love and Sex, a poetry collection. When she passed away in 2019, she had been working on a third novel and collections of poetry and short fiction.

Margaret appeared at Poetry with Prakriti in 2013.

Reading from Margaret’s poetry and other writing are: Karthika V.K., Maria Couto, Nilanjana Roy, Peter Griffin, Rosalyn D’Mello, Saryu Doshi, Sivagami Natesan, Sudeep Chakravarti, Tishani Doshi, Venita Coelho, and Urvashi Bahugana.