Keynote Speakers
Shantanu Anand (poet, co-founder of Airplane Poetry Movement, India)
Shantanu Anand has spent his life immersed in a world of words. In 2014, along with Nandini Varma, he co-founded Airplane Poetry Movement, an organisation that worked tirelessly to train budding spoken word poets, and provide platforms for them to share their words. In 2016, he led the organisation, marketing and curation of India’s first ever National Youth Poetry Slam. In 2019, he co-created the poetry anthology, A Letter, A Poem, A Home, a collection of some of India’s finest English-language poems from the year, which sold out its first print-run within forty-eight hours.
In 2019, he joined the organisation Kommune, where he worked to provide stages for more than ten thousand people from across the country to share their poems and stories, and led the social media efforts of the company. He has been part of the core curation team of Spoken Fest, Asia’s largest spoken word and storytelling festival, for its editions in 2020, 2022, and 2024.
In 2019, he was included in the Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list for his contributions to the performance arts. He is currently working on his debut novel.
Dr. Cornelia Gräbner (Lancaster University, UK)
Cornelia Gräbner works as Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature at Lancaster University, UK. She researches and has widely published on poetry-in-performance, on committed writing, and on 20th and 21st century resistance literatures in Europe and in the Americas.
Among her publications are an early edited collections on Performance Poetry (with Arturo Casas Vales), special issues on the Poetics of Resistance, on Poetry in Public Spaces and, most recently in collaboration with Joost de Bloois and Jim Hicks, on Oppositional Speech and La Parola Contrari
In the area of Cultural Studies she researches on imaginaries of acquiescence in contemporary narrative literature and on imaginaries of critical hope in the archival collections of Academic Centre for the Memory of ‘Our América’ in Mexico City. As part of this research she has worked with Girasol Press to publish a selection of poetry written by political prisoners in Argentina, and with the charity Music for Hope to release an EP with musicalizations of anonymous poems written during the Civil War in El Salvador and left in a safe house in Mexico.