India has world-class writers you’ve not read. Can ‘Hyphen’ change that?

Now Shanbhag, 64, wants to make that journey possible for more writers. His answer is Hyphen: a literary journal, publishing house, and digital platform rolled into one that intends to bring Indian-language writing into a wider conversation.

Vivek Shanbhag’s Hyphen. (https://the-hyphen.in/)

Shanbhag insists that Hyphen did not arrive as a sudden inspiration, that it grew out of conversations that his team had been having with “literary friends in Kannada and other Indian languages”. “Hyphen was not an epiphany,” he says, “It is an idea that has grown over decades, born out of a need to understand how writers in Indian languages are responding to the political, social and economic changes, larger concerns and conflicts of our times.”

Much of Hyphen’s DNA can be traced to Shanbhag’s seven years editing Desha Kaala, the Kannada literary magazine that introduced readers to Tamil, Hindi, Bengali and Marathi writers including Jeyamohan, Uday Prakash and Meena Kandasamy. That editorship, he says, “made me realise two things. First, the diversity of styles and traditions across Indian languages is extraordinarily rich and distinctive. Second, discovering these writers is difficult when one cannot encounter their work first-hand.”

The process of scouting new work for the magazine was always “a long and pleasurable journey” — the team “invariably discovered unexpected gems along the way.” But it was not without its share of frustrations. Some of the writers Desha Kaala championed took decades to reach English-language readers. “Imagine how much richer our literary conversations would have been if these works were available in English 20 years ago, when they first appeared in Desha Kaala,” says Shanbhag.

Hyphen, in effect, runs the same experiment in the opposite direction — except its target language is not Kannada but English, and its intended audience is not one linguistic community but the larger world. “As direct translations between Indian languages have steadily declined, English has become the most effective way to access the literature of other Indian languages,” he says.

The scale of the ambition explains why Hyphen exists as three institutions rather than one, all housed under the Bahuvachana Trust. “Hyphen’s objective is to offer a fuller literary experience through these distinct ways of engaging with readers,” says Shanbhag.

The print journal, he explains, brings together “a rich diversity of writing, allowing readers to explore and reflect at their own pace,” while the website adds articles, book reviews, poetry, fiction, plays and interviews through the week.

The publishing house, meanwhile, takes on the longer, slower work of bringing full-length books into English and “places them within a larger publishing ecosystem”. “No previous initiative has attempted to bring India’s diverse literary traditions together on this scale and place them within a shared global conversation,” says Shanbhag.

Hyphen launches amid unusual global attention to Indian-language writing — Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated into English by Daisy Rockwell, won the International Booker Prize in 2022, the first novel translated from Hindi to do so; Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, won it in 2025.

But Shanbhag is wary of mistaking a prize cycle for lasting change. Awards illuminate their winners, he says, but that attention becomes durable only when readers have access to a range of writers; when it enables Indian-language authors to enter literary conversations on their own terms, rather than being wheeled out periodically as translation’s success stories.

There are, he insists, “many world-class writers working in Indian languages who deserve to be read” for their ideas, worldview and craft. Hyphen’s task is to make sure readers finally get the chance.