Vayu Naidu is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Royal Holloway University of London, History, Humanities 2019-2021. Her recent public conversation was with Daniel Hahn OBE on the significance of languages and literatures in translation. She is also Research Associate at the Centre for the Circulation of Literatures and Post-Colonial Studies at the South Asia Studies Institute at SOAS and is continuing her work with MULOSOGIE and the Being Human Project. Her PhD from the University of Leeds was in performance oral traditions. She was the first storyteller transposing the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in English with western orchestras and museums, and Arts Education for a Multicultural Society, commissioned by Arts Council England. She won the Humanities Teaching Award from the University of Kent for her work with tsunami survivors in villages from Chennai to Salem, Tamil Nadu in 2004. She was the Arts and Humanities Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellow in Creative and Performing Arts leading on intercultural storytelling in performance, multicultural literacy, mental health, and migration. Arts Council England funded the Vayu Naidu Company as a Regional Funded Organisation from 2004-2012. Her work includes plays for radio drama for BBC 4, theater storytelling for Contemporary Music, and her Ramayana at the Barbican and The British Library, touring from Scotland to Scandinavia. Her novels are Sita’s Ascent, which was nominated for the Commonwealth Book Award, The Sari of Surya Vilas, which was featured on ABC as Australia’s Book of the Week. Her short story is titled Madurai Mystery of Victoriana. Her next literary historical fiction set in 17th century England and India is about a time of trade and treacherous transition, and the triumph of art over tyranny. It features Sanskrit and Persian texts that were in circulation during the time of the first English Traders.