Speaker : Sarah Voke
English department, Université Savoie-Mont Blanc, Chambéry, France
@ : sarah.voke@univ-smb.fr
Chairperson : P. Ramya Bala
DST-INSPIRE Faculty, National Institute of Advanced Studies
@ : pramyabala@nias.res.in
Date : 24th, February 2026
Time : 3:30 PM
Venue : Conference Hall 1
Abstract: Meena Alexander’s life was forged through the crossing of borders – geographic, linguistic, and cultural. She was born in 1951 in Allahabad to an Indian family originating from Kerala. When her father was offered a job in Sudan, she moved with her family to Khartoum, crossing the Indian Ocean as a five-year old. She lived there until the age of eighteen, learning Arabic and French, while inheriting Malayalam from her parents and acquiring English alongside. She thus grew up, travelling back and forth across the Indian Ocean between Sudan and Kerala, spending months at a time in each place. At eighteen, she opted to study Romantic poetry at the University of Nottingham, and in 1973 she returned to India to teach in Delhi and Hyderabad. In 1979, she settled in New York City where she worked as an academic and emerged as a renowned writer.
I am currently taking part in the ‘Villa Swagatam residency program’, supported by the French Institute in India. Its aim is to foster artistic and literary exchanges between France and India. My project also seeks to cross borders: I am working on the first French translation of Meena Alexander’s work, who is renowned for her lyrical poetry, essays and autobiographical writing. I have chosen to begin with her memoir ‘Fault Lines’, first published in 1993, as it serves as an introduction to her life trajectory and her complex reflections on living in exile. Her memoir beautifully weaves together the themes of memory, displacement, childhood trauma, and the threshold experiences of living between countries, cultures and languages
About the speaker: Sarah Voke is a researcher and translator. She completed a PhD in Comparative Literature in Marseille which focused on contemporary women poets (Aix-Marseille Université, 2022, "Meena Alexander, Seher Cakir, Amina Said: three women poets of exile"). Her work explores the interconnections between poetry, experiences of exile, multilingualism and identity, from a phenomenological perspective. She is currently preparing a book publication based on her doctoral research. Based in the French Alps, she teaches anglophone literature and translation at the University Savoie Mont Blanc in Chambéry.