A. Mangai is the pseudonym of Dr V. Padma. She retired as an Associate Professor in English from Stella Maris College, Chennai. She has been actively engaged in Tamil theatre as an actor, director and playwright for almost four decades. She writes bilingually. Her fields of interest are theatre, gender, and translation studies. She is also interested in classical Tamil literature from a contemporary perspective of gender, ecology, and culture.  

She has been a recipient of the Fulbright Fellowship twice: for post-doctoral work at the Tisch School of Performance Studies, New York, USA (1997-98), and for a visiting lectureship at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA (2004). She has also taught a course called ‘Drama from the “Other” Worlds’ at King Alfred’s College, Winchester, U.K., for two consecutive years (1999-2000). She was given the Rockefeller-Bellagio Residency to work on her monograph (2009). 

She has directed over forty plays so far—all of them deal with women-centred themes and characters. She strives to create a language of theatre from the traditional forms of Tamil Nadu. Her Kaala Kanavu is a docudrama on the feminist history of Tamil Nadu. She has directed five plays of Inquilab based on classical Tamil texts, which include Avvai, Manimekalai, and Kurinji Pattu. Her most recent play is Stree Parvam, an anti-war play. She has evolved eight plays with the Suriya Women’s Cultural Group in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. Mattunagar Kannagaikal, a collection of plays evolved with this collective, has been published in 2020.

Her work with the transgender community over the past two decades has helped form Kannadi Kalai Kuzhu. She has directed two plays for them: Manasin Azhaippu and Uraiyatha Ninaivugal, and continues to work on queer themes and artists. Her recent works with the trans artists include Vellaimozhi.

Two of her plays are available in English: Pani-t-thee (translated as Frozen Fire) and Pacha Mannu (translated as New Born). Her collection of plays, Moonru Natakangal, is prescribed at the undergraduate level in many colleges. Her monograph on the Tamil writer Krithika was brought out by Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi; Acting Up: Gender and Theatre in India 1979 Onwards has been published by LeftWord, New Delhi. She co-edited Listen to the Flames (with Tapan Basu and Indranil Acharya), which was published by the Oxford University Press in 2016.

Some of her major translations include Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonizing the Mind as Adaiyala Meetpu, Robert J.C. Young’s Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, Therigatha (into Tamil from the English versions), trans activist A. Revathi’s first book, Unarvum Uruvamum as Our Lives Our Words, Halla Bol—a memoir of Safdar Hashmi—into Tamil, Avvai into English (Sahitya Akademi, 2022), and Volga to Ganges (Siir Vasagar Vattam, 2026).