(Left to right) Saniya Rohida, Jessica Faleiro, Niranjana Hariharanandanan, Venkataraghavan Srinivasan, Janice Pariat (mentor), Rhea Candy, Zehra Naqvi, Arushi Vats, and Sanaa Bhutani
Helter Skelter
Writing Residency
2021 Edition
Goa, India
2021: Resident Writers and Mentor
Doing the write thing.
Over the past decade or so, we have worked towards building a platform for original and outstanding new literature from India, most notably through the Helter Skelter Anthology of New Writing. After having published six volumes of new writing—with volume 7 coming very soon—we’re now taking our next big leap.
Learning the craft of writing.
The Helter Skelter Writing Residency in 2021 was a week-long residential workshop aimed towards supporting and educating writers across India.
The residency programme offered the attending writers exclusive access to rigorous and high-quality instruction, and guidance from an experienced and acclaimed author, who was their mentor for the week. It helped them to hone their craft; to come away with a fresh perspective on their writing and a framework that allowed them to make their writing stronger, brighter, deeper.
Residency 2021
Our first residency programme focused on fiction-writing in English, and we hosted it in the the ageless and traditional village of Saligao in Bardez, Goa. Known for its people, food, and the old tale of timid foxes, Saligao is acknowledged as one of Goa’s global villages and finds mention in works as far as Francis Newton Souza’s famed artwork ‘The Red Road’ to photographer and Saligao resident Dayanita Singh’s series of portraits titled ‘Ladies of Saligao’.
In Saligao, the attending writers lived and worked out of Bate-Papo (Portuguese for conversation or chit-chat), a beautiful boutique homestay nestled in one of the bylanes of the village. We chose this venue with a lot of care: it is a quiet and accessible space that allows one to easily switch between relaxation and the sort of intense and single-minded focus that creative writing often demands.
“As a writer, you’re always looking at something in the manner of someone looking at the thing that they love. Just as you look at the face of a lover, because it’s endlessly fascinating, you look at the world in the same way, otherwise you can’t write about it. It’s also the way we’re supposed to look at the world we’ve made up, or we can’t write about that, either.”
— Janice Pariat
Residency Mentor
Our mentor for the Helter Skelter Writing Residency in 2021 was Janice Pariat, author of Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories and Seahorse: A Novel. She was awarded the Young Writer Award from the Sahitya Akademi and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction in 2013.
She studied English Literature at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and History of Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Her work—including art reviews, book reviews, fiction and poetry—has featured in a wide selection of national magazines and newspapers. In 2014, she was the Charles Wallace Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Kent, U.K.
Her novella The Nine Chambered-Heart is out with HarperCollins India (November 2017) and HarperCollins U.K. (May 2018), and is being translated for publication into nine languages including Italian, Spanish, French, and German.
