Ritu Menon is an Indian
feminist, writer and publisher.[1][2]
Career
In 1984, Menon co-founded
Kali for Women, India's first exclusively feminist publishing house, along with
Urvashi Butalia, her longtime collaborator. In 2003, Kali for Women shut shop due to lack of commercial viability compounded by irreconcilable personal differences between Menon and Butalia. Thereafter, Menon independently founded Women Unlimited, another feminist publishing house.[3]
She has also written numerous newspaper articles and
op-eds. Her writing focuses on
violence against women, religion's take on women and the gender divide across the society from a strongly
feminist and left-wing perspective.[4]
Over a
Zoom call, she talked about Address Book: A Publishing Memoir in the time of COVID, which she wrote during the pandemic without an explicit plan to publish a book. “It became a form of putting down what I was going through, remembering, thinking, reading, and worrying about,” she says (13 July 2021).[5]