Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay – författare

A woman arrives alone in Kolkata, taking refuge in a deserted apartment while she waits to undergo an unspecified surgery. In this disorienting city, everything seems new and strange: the pavement-dwellers outside her block, the collective displays of religiosity, the power cuts and alarming acts of arson. Her sense of identity already shaken, when she finds a stained pair of leopard print panties in the otherwise-empty wardrobe she begins to fantasise about their former owner, whose imagined life comes to blur with and overlap her own.Pairing manic energy with dark eroticism, Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay''s writing has a surreal, feverish quality, slipping between fluid subjects with great stylistic daring. Credited with being ''the woman who reintroduced hardcore sexuality into Bengali literature'', Bandyopadhyay is neither superficial nor sensationalistic, equally concerned with debates on religion and nationhood as with gender and sexuality.

Winner of an English PEN awardWith her days split between a passionate marriage and a high-octane television studio job, Homi is a thoroughly modern young woman – until one day she is approached by a yogi in the street.Convinced that the yogi is a manifestation of fate, Homi embarks on a series of increasingly desperate attempts to prove that her life is ruled by her own free will, much to the alarm of her no-nonsense husband and cattily snobbish mother. Her middle-class Kolkata life, and the relationships that define her identity, are disturbed to the point of disintegration.Following the inexorable pull of tradition, Homi ends up in Benaras, the holy city on the banks of the Ganga, where her final battle with fate plays out.The new novel by Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay is a brilliant portrait of a young millennial in contemporary India who is torn between her modern life and tradition. Bandyopadhyay''s unflinching look at sex, work and family redefines comfortable notions of what the life of young women is supposed to look like.