C.S. Lakshmi, writing under the pseudonym of Ambai, is a feminist Tamil writer. She was born in 1944 in Tamil Nadu, and grew up in Bangalore and Mumbai. She received her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University and her stories have been translated into five volumes entitled In a Forest, A Deer, Fish in a Dwindling Lake, A Meeting on the Andheri Overbridge, The Purple Sea, and A Night with a Black Spider. Her writing touches on societal perceptions and the understanding of one’s self, family, sensitivity, and love and its restrictions.

She received the Ford Foundation Fellowship for her project ‘Illustrated Social History of Women in Tamil Nadu in 1981; in 1992 she received the Homi Bhabha Fellowship to do a project on female musicians, dancers and painters. Indian feminist publisher ‘Kali for women’ has published this research work in two volumes, entitled ‘Singer and the Song’ and ‘Mirrors and Gestures’. Other non-fiction works include The Face Behind the Mask: Women in Tamil Literature (Vikas, New Delhi, 1984), An Idiom of Silence: An Oral History And Pictorial Study of Art, Consciousness and Women in a Series entitled Seven Seas and Seven Mountains. ‘The Unhurried City: Writings on Chennai’ (ed.) (2004) published by Penguin Books, ‘Walking Erect with An Unfaltering Gaze’ (2013). Recently she translated ‘Black Coffee in a Coconut Shell’ (2018) a collection of essays on personal experience with caste, ed. by Perumal Murugan.

In 1988, Lakshmi founded SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women) a non-governmental organization for documenting and archiving the work of female writers and artists. She is currently a member of the University of Michigan’s Global Feminisms Project. She was awarded the Lifetime Literary Achievement Award of Tamil Literary Garden, University of Toronto, in 2008. She lives in Mumbai with her husband, foster daughter and two brothers.