Meena Kandasamy is an anti-caste activist, poet, novelist and translator. She has written books of poems such as Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010), as well as three novels, The Gypsy Goddess (2014), When I Hit You (2017), and Exquisite Cadavers (2019). Her novels have been shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Hindu Lit Prize.

She has been a fellow of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent and a fellow of the Berlin-based Junge Akademie. In 2022, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL), United Kingdom.

Her op-eds and essays have appeared in The White Review, Guernica, The Guardian and The New York Times, among other places.