Babitha Marina Justin

Babitha Marina Justin is a writer and artist who teaches English at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology in Thiruvananthapuram, where rockets and rhymes share a campus. With a PhD in travel writing and gender, she moves between page and canvas. Her books include the debut poetry collection Of Fireflies, Guns and the Hills (2015), the essays of From Canons to Trauma (2018), salt, pepper and silver linings: celebrating our grandmothers (co-edited with Abhirami Sriram, 2019), the poetry collections I Cook My Own Feast (2019) and Forty-Five Shades of Brown (2023), and, most recently, The Way Madmen Smell (2026). She also illustrated the National Book Trust's Kichangani (2023). Her poems, essays and translations have appeared in journals across India and abroad, and her art has been shown in two solo and several group exhibitions.