Usha Rajagopalan is a writer, translator and environmentalist. She has won several prizes, including the Commonwealth Short Story Competition for three consecutive years. She has been in residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation as the Charles Wallace Fellow, University of East Anglia, UK; Sangam House, Bangalore; Le Château de Lavigny in Switzerland; and at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She is also the translator of Selected Poems of Subramania Bharati (Hachette India). As an activist, she has campaigned to save a lake in Bangalore from extinction. The Puttenahalli Neighbourhood Lake Improvement Trust is the first citizens’ group in the city to formally maintain a rejuvenated lake.