Amruta Patil
Amruta Patil is an Indian graphic novel author and painter.
Background
Amruta Patil was raised in Goa, where her father served in the Indian Navy. She has a BFA degree from Goa College of Art, and Master of Fine Arts degree from Tufts University, School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.Early career
Amruta Patil worked as a copywriter at Enterprise Nexus in 1999-2000. She was the co-founder and editor of the quarterly magazine, 'Mindfields'. She was awarded a TED Fellowship in 2009.Graphic Novels
Amruta Patil's debut graphic novel, Kari, commissioned and published by VK Karthika at HarperCollins India, explored themes of sexuality, friendship, and death; and heralded Patil as India's first female graphic novelist. A self proclaimed "oddball" who grew up in a small town without much exposure to comics culture, Patil has spoken about her autodidactic process and evolving style. Kari has been the subject of various academic dissertations.Her two subsequent graphic novels Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean and Sauptik: Blood and Flowers form the Parva Duology which retells stories from the Mahabharata from the viewpoint of the outlier narrators Ganga and Ashwatthama respectively. Speaking about these two novels, she talks about her decision to choose the two above-mentioned narrators because of their peripheral role in traditional retellings of the lore. The importance of the sutradhar has been reiterated - as a "way of bringing the stories closer to the present."
[file:Amruta Patil with Nari Shakti Puraskar (cropped).jpg|thumb|left|Amruta Patil with Nari Shakti Puraskar]
Her work has been translated into French and Italian.
In 2009, Patil became the first Indian artist-in-residence at Maison des Auteurs in Angoulême, France, where she lived and worked for nearly a decade, participating in the city’s comics and visual arts community.
Her fourth graphic novel - Aranyaka - came about after conversations with her friend, the mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik. Aranyaka was first published by Westland in 2019, and then by HarperCollins India in 2023.
After a decade-long association with "comic book capital" Angoulême and La Maison des Auteurs, a juried residency for comic book auteurs, Patil relocated to India in 2019.
Amruta Patil had a solo show called Altar at the Serendipity Arts Festival 2019. She started painting grand-format acrylic tableaus in 2020.
She is the co-founder of Qomix, the world’s first non-fiction comics app.
Patil’s visual practice includes large-scale paintings and mixed media works. Her first solo exhibition, Altar, was presented at the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa in December 2019. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, she focused extensively on painting, which she has described as an important phase in the development of her artistic practice.
Public engagements
Amruta Patil was a speaker at the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival in 2017.In 2018, she was a speaker and artist in residence at the School of Divinity, University of Chicago.