Ambai Author

C.S. Lakshmi, writing under the pseudonym of Ambai, is a feminist Tamil writer. She was born in 1944 in Tamil Nadu, and grew up in Bangalore and Mumbai. Her works include In a Forest, A Deer, Fish in a Dwindling Lake, A Meeting on the Andheri Overbridge, The Purple Sea, and A Night with a Black Spider. Her short stories portray the reality of women's lives, communicating their silence through words. She has worked on research projects such as: The Face Behind the Mask: Women in Tamil Literature. In 1988, Lakshmi founded SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women) a non-governmental organization for documenting and archiving the work of female writers and artists. About the translator: Lakshmi Holmström translated short stories, novels, and poetry by the major contemporary writers in Tamil. Her most recent books are Fish in a Dwindling Lake by Ambai (2012); A Second Sunrise, poems by Cheran; Wild Girls, Wicked Words, a translation of poems by four Tamil women (2012). In 2007 she shared the Crossword-Hutch Award for her translation of Ambai's short stories, In a Forest, a Deer; and she received the Iyal Award from the Tamil Literary Garden, Canada, in 2008.