Secret Theatres

SHARANYA MANIVANNAN was born in Madras, India in 1985, and grew up in Sri Lanka and Malaysia. Her first book of poems was Witchcraft (2008), which was lauded in The Straits Times as being “sensuous and spiritual, delicate and dangerous and as full as the moon reflected in a knife”. She is currently working on a book of stories (The High Priestess Never Marries), a novel (Constellation of Scars), as well as two manuscripts of new poems (Bulletproof Offering and Cadaver Exquisito).

A Pushcart Prize nominee (for “I Will Come Bearing Mangoes”, Rougarou, Fall 2011), her poetry, essays and fiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Drunken Boat, Killing the Buddha, Superstition Review, Dark Sky Magazine, Softblow and Pratilipi. A journalist and columnist, she wrote a personal column, “The Venus Flytrap”, for The New Indian Express from 2008 to 2011.

Sharanya is noted in particular for her unusual onstage charisma, and she has read her work extensively since 2001 at venues as diverse as colleges, bars, bookstores, embassies, an abandoned pier, a cemetery, the 11^th century Borobudur temple and while sitting in an autorickshaw.

She has lived in Chennai since 2007. More about and by her can be found online. She also Tweets and blogs.