Akshaj Awasthi (they/he) is a literary translator and student of art history currently residing in New Delhi, working from Urdu and Hindi into English. Their ongoing translation of Nasera Sharma’s novel Alpha-Beta-Gamma was shortlisted for the inaugural Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation in 2023. Read More They graduated from Ashoka University in 2022 with a major in history and two minors: creative writing and visual arts. While at Ashoka, Akshaj translated a selection of short stories by the Hyderabadi author Wajida Tabassum from Urdu into English, supervised by Arunava Sinha. Concurrently, his art historical research examined the eighteenth-century arts of the book and manuscript painting in the Deccan region of India. Akshaj is a hesitant polyglot, comfortable at varying levels with Spanish, Persian, French, Punjabi and Hungarian, in addition to Hindi, Urdu, and English. This autumn, they will begin their graduate studies at the University of Oxford for their MPhil in Islamic Art and Architecture funded by the Mica and Ahmet Ertegun Graduate Scholarship in the Humanities.