Neerja Mattoo is a Srinagar-based writer and translator. Before her retirement, she was Principal and Head of Department of English at the Government College for Women, Srinagar. Apart from other works and papers published in academic journals, she has published three collections of contemporary Kashmiri short stories translated into English: The Stranger Beside Me, Contemporary Kashmiri Short Stories, and Kath Stories from Kashmir, which have been very favourably reviewed. She also co-edited a book on the Kashmiri saint Bhagwan Gopinath. She was awarded a British Council Visitorship to the University of Oxford in 1984 and a Human Resource Ministry’s Senior Fellowship in 1997 to work on Kashmiri women poets.