Indian author & poet Meena Kandasamy won German PEN award.

• Indian author and poet Meena Kandasamy has been announced as this year’s recipient of the Hermann Kesten Prize by the PEN Centre in Germany’s
• The Hermann Kesten Prize honours personalities who, in the spirit of the charter of the PEN association, stand up for the rights of persecuted authors and journalists.
• The PEN Center, Germany, will present the award to the Indian author at a ceremony in Darmstadt on November 15 this year.
• The winner will receive an amount of €20,000 ($19,996) as prize money. This year, the PEN Center is also honouring the website “Weiter Schreiben” (German for “Keep writing”) with a special award for encouragement, for giving authors in exile and writers from conflict zones a platform to express their thoughts.

About Meena Kandasamy:

• Meena Kandasamy was born in 1984 in Chennai, Kandasamy is a feminist and anti-caste activist whose work revolves around the issue of gender, caste, sexuality, patriarchy, and oppression by the Brahmanical system.
• Her novels have been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Hindu Lit Prize.
• She previously held an editorial role at the English-language magazine ‘The Dalit’. Kandasamy has been a vocal critic of the arrest of fellow writers like Varavara Rao and former Delhi University professor G N Saibaba.