Dear Readers,
It was wonderful to see so many of you at our events with Mick Herron and Zadie Smith last week. Now that we’ve had a moment to collect ourselves, it’s time to announce another really exciting date for our autumn schedule.
You are warmly invited to join us for a very special event to mark the launch of Bristol-based Lurid Editions republication of the early anti-imperial feminist classic, The Awakening of Indian Women.

Thursday 12th October, 6.30-8pm, Gloucester Road Books, 184 Gloucester Road. Tickets & more info are available here.
Writers, researchers and academics, Maya Caspari and Aparna Mahiyaria, will be in conversation to celebrate this landmark 20th century text which was first published on the eve of the Second World War and, until now, buried in the archives. This unique document from the first global feminist movement is testimony to the deep historical roots of revolutionary feminist thought and action.
For Amia Srinivasan, Kamaladevi’s The Awakening of Indian Women is “radical and visionary” and “deserves a place on feminist reading lists and in the wider transnationalist feminist imagination. Among other things, it is a potent reminder that feminism is not an invention or prerogative of the West.”
Told by a vibrant cast of activists at the centre of feminist and anti-imperial struggles, The Awakening of Indian Women includes a historical account of the Indian feminist movement written by Irish suffrage activist and anti-colonial agitator Margaret Cousins.
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (3 April 1903–29 October 1988) was an artist, activist and a central figure in the inter-war Indian feminist movement. A twentieth century Indian feminist icon, after independence she is celebrated for leading the revival of Indian handicrafts, handlooms, and theatre after independence.
About the Speakers:
Maya Caspari is writer, curator and researcher and currently works as a lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her book Reading Frictions: Memory, Violence and The Politics of Touch in Contemporary World Literature is forthcoming. Maya curated Forms, Voices, Networks: Feminism and the Media—an online exhibition for the German Historical Institute London. Her poetry has appeared in The Poetry Review and Ambit, and was highly commended in the 2022 Forward Prizes.
Aparna Mahiyaria is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter whose work is grounded in Marxist-Feminist praxis, and engages with the intersections of performance and politics, particularly in the context of South Asia. She is interested in how performance practices emerge from and intervene in their political contexts, challenge colonial histories as well as contemporary imperialist-Hindutva epistemological onslaughts.
Lurid editions are based in Bristol and publish ‘lurid writing from the 20th century and beyond.’ @lurid_editions |