Arunava Sinha – författare

A landmark new anthology of Bengali literature in English, including many previously untranslated stories 'A splendid guide to unmapped lands… [Sinha] is one of the best living translators at work bringing the Bengali classics into English… he writes with exceptional elegance and wit' Spectator The prose short story arrived in Bengal in the wake of British colonizers, and Bengali writers quickly made the form their own. By the twentieth century a profusion of literary magazines and journals meant they were being avidly read by millions.Writers responded to this hunger for words with a ferocious energy which reflected the turmoil of their times: these stories covered land wars, famine, the caste system, religious conflict, patriarchy, Partition and the liberation war that saw the emergence of the independent country of Bangladesh. Across these shifting geographical borders, writers also looked inward, evolving new literary styles and stretching the possibilities of social realism, political fiction and intimate domestic tales.A first in English, this anthology gathers together a century's worth of extraordinary stories. From a woman who eats fish in secret to the woes of an ageing local footballer, from the anxieties of a middle-class union rep to a lawyer who stumbles upon a philosopher's stone, this is a collection that celebrates making art of life, in all its difficulty and joy.

A landmark new anthology of Bengali literature in English, including many previously untranslated stories 'A splendid guide to unmapped lands… [Sinha] is one of the best living translators at work bringing the Bengali classics into English… he writes with exceptional elegance and wit, and is astonishingly productive.' - The Spectator The prose short story arrived in Bengal in the wake of British colonizers, and Bengali writers quickly made the form their own. By the twentieth century a profusion of literary magazines and journals meant they were being avidly read by millions.Writers responded to this hunger for words with a ferocious energy which reflected the turmoil of their times: these stories covered land wars, famine, the caste system, religious conflict, patriarchy, Partition and the liberation war that saw the emergence of the independent country of Bangladesh. Across these shifting geographical borders, writers also looked inward, evolving new literary styles and stretching the possibilities of social realism, political fiction and intimate domestic tales.A first in English, this anthology gathers together a century's worth of extraordinary stories. From a woman who eats fish in secret to the woes of an ageing local footballer, from the anxieties of a middle-class union rep to a lawyer who stumbles upon a philosopher's stone, this is a collection that celebrates making art of life, in all its difficulty and joy.

Bangladesh in 1971 showed vividly, and terribly, the deadly effects of war. Piles of corpses, torture cells, ash and destruction everywhere in the wake of the Pakistani army’s attacks on Bengali people. Blue Venom and Forbidden Incense, two novellas by Bangladeshi writer Syed Shamsul Haq, bear bleak witness to the mindless violence and death of that period. Blue Venom tells of a middle-aged middle manager who is arrested and taken to a cell, where he is slowly tortured to death for being a namesake of a rebel poet Kazi Nazrul Islam. Forbidden Incense, meanwhile, tells of a woman’s return to her paternal village after her husband was taken by the army. In the village, she meets a boy with a Muslim name whose entire family has been killed; as they attempt together to gather and bury scattered corpses, they, too, are caught by the killers.

There are many ways to travel between India and the UK in general, and Calcutta and Norwich in particular. You could take a plane and then the bus or the train, or perhaps a taxi. You could even sail. But what if you traveled via literature instead? In Writing Places you will find such a journey. This collection draws together stories, poems, photographs, memoirs, confessions, and investigations from some of the most imaginative writers and photographers working in the UK and India today to create a journey between the two lands that you can savor with your mind, heart, and even body. A unique work for armchair travelers, Writing Places lets us move between two countries that share a long history in a first-of-its-kind collection of words and images.

A strong and courageous novel that deftly tackles psychosis.In Melbourne, Australia, a woman in her late thirties is diagnosed with her third episode of psychosis, amounting to schizophrenia. What follows is a frenzied journey from home to a community house to a hospital and out again. Sanya, the protagonist, finds herself questioning the diagnosis of her sanity or insanity, as determined and defined by a medical model which seems less than convincing to her. Having studied psychology herself, she wonders whether, even if the diagnosis is correct to some extent, the treatment should be different. Sanya tells her story in a deceptively calm, first-person voice, using conversations as the primary narrative mode, as she ponders if and when the next psychotic episode will materialize.Based on real-life events and originally written in Bengali, Hospital is a daring first novel that unflinchingly depicts the precarity of a woman living with psychosis and her struggles with the definition of sanity in our society.

The seventh-most spoken language in the world,Bengali is home to some of the most distinctivepoetry ever written anywhere. Starting with thelater poems of Nobel Laureate RabindranathTagore, there has been a long and continuousline of modern poetry in the language.