Trained in epic literature as Performance Storytelling, Vayu writes, lives in London mostly, and in Mammallapuram.
Her new novel : THE LIVING LEGEND – RAMAYANA TALES NEAR AND FAR ( Ebury Press: 2024) is available on Amazon.co.uk and was launched at Jaipur Literature Festival ( Jaipur) in February 2025. The focus is on the significance of forest life that restores balance to a world rumbling with greed and corruption.
Appointed as the first ‘Sage in Residence’ at Eton College she was working on heroism across epic literatures of Greece and India. It inspired her first novel Sita’s Ascent (Penguin India: 2013). It was launched at Jaipur Literature Festival, India. This novel is a reimagining of the circumstances and resilience about an iconic woman, twice exiled. It was nominated for the Commonwealth Book Award. It is derived from her oral storytelling that spans diaspora urban, epic, folk and tribal stories from multiple literary and street sources. Cultural binaries immersing characters in challenging landscapes, meta texts, while speaking across historical and national borders is a strong feature of her writing.
Her second novel The Sari of Surya Vilas (Speaking Tiger-India, Affirmpress- Australia: 2017) is historical fiction set in the Madras Presidency from 1857-1916 and Norfolk, England. The silenced stories woven in a wedding sari, and the emergence of the Oxford Dictionary is symbolic of freedom through woven story and language as identity. The novel was featured in Australia’s ABC Broadcast as Book of the week. She is a Literature Festival enthusiast and has chaired many panels promoting emerging writers at Jaipur Lit. Fest, Byron Writers Festival, British Library among others. She has written for British Theatre, BBC Radio Drama, and tours internationally as a Performance Storyteller. Her work is archived in the SADAA website.
Her historical setting of Madurai is published in HWA’s anthology VICTORIANA.
Her PhD (Leeds) and AHRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship (Kent) enabled academic research and Apprenticeships in Intercultural Storytelling validating oral traditions. She received the Humanities Teaching Award University of Kent, for enabling students in participatory work with Refugees at Margate and donated it to Tsunami survivors working with the Fishing community in Tamil Nadu. Her work in category A Prisons, with women emerging from domestic violence, and young people has strengthened her belief in the transformative capacity of the Word and the Arts. Vayu Naidu Intercultural Storytelling Theatre, an Arts Council England RFO enabled new writing and International touring.
She is now Royal Literary Fund Bridge Fellow and is Professor of Practice at The School of Arts, SOAS, and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. She volunteers at Chelsea Physic Garden as a Guide on the history and politics of traditional medicine plants and the empire of botany. She is inspired by the rock-cut shore temples of Mamallapuram, by the SE Bay of Bengal, Chennai India, where she returns every year to revisit the past.
She was long listed for her historical novel by the SI Leeds Literary Prize 2024 and is working toward publication.
Her articles on history, Indian philosophy and contemporary reflections can be read on academia.edu and Intellect 2.0
