Usha Rajagopalan is a writer, translator and lake activist living in Bengaluru. She has written books in varied genres – a crime novel, Tracking Purnima, two volumes of poetic translation into English of Mahakavi Subramania Bharati’s poetry (Panchali’s Pledge and Selected Poems). A social novel Amrita; Corpse Kesavan & Other Stories and a manual for writers Get Published (ed.). She won the Federation of Indian Publishers’ Award for Get Published and prizes in the Commonwealth Short Story Competition in 2001, 2002 and 2003; Quest All India Poetry Prize, 1993 and 2nd prize in the Muse India Translation competition 2008 for poetry. She was the Charles Wallace Fellow, 2011 at the British Centre for Literary Translation, University of East Anglia and Andrew Fellow in Fiction, 1999 at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She has been awarded residencies at the Sangam House, Bengaluru (2011) and at Le Château De Lavigny, Switzerland 2009). Her lake restoration activism has won her and her team several accolades including the prestigious Namma Bengaluru Award and getting featured in the Times Now national television series “Amazing Indians” in 2012.