Letters from Sampsonia Way

Tuhin Das is a Bengali writer currently living in the U.S. He is from Barishal, a city in south-central Bangladesh. He was involved in the little magazine movement in his country, and edited several literary magazines. His poetry criticism, short stories, and opinion columns have been widely published in the past twenty years in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India. He is the author of eight books of poetry in his native language. Critics consider him a significant poet of Generation Zero, who began publishing in 2000. His life was deeply impacted by groups who limit freedom of expression. Carnegie Mellon University invited him to Pittsburgh, PA as a visiting scholar, and City of Asylum invited him to join their writer sanctuary program. He left his home country, Bangladesh, in 2016. Das’s work has appeared in The Logue Project’s Home Language, Words Without Borders, The Bare Life Review, Immigrant Report, The Offing, and Epiphany. His poetry collection Exile Poems is forthcoming from Bridge & Tunnel Books.

Arunava Sinha is a noted Indian translator of Bengali literature. He was born and raised in Kolkata. Over fifty of his translations have been published so far. Twice the winner of the Crossword translation award, for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), respectively, and the winner of the Muse India translation award (2013) for Buddhadeva Bose’s When The Time Is Right, he has also been shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction prize (2009) for his translation of Chowringhee and longlisted for the Best Translated Book award, USA, 2018 for his translation of Bhaskar Chakrabarti’s Things That Happen and Other Poems. His translation of Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s The Yogini was one of 16 books from across the world to win the 2017 PEN Translates Award. Besides India, his translations have been published in the UK and the US in English, and in several European and Asian countries through further translation. He is the editor of the Library of Bangladesh, a series of Bangladeshi fiction translated into English from Bengali, and of the Book of Dhaka, a collection of short stories from Bangladesh translated into English. He has conducted translation workshops at the British Centre for Literary Translation, UEA; University of Chicago; Dhaka Translation Centre; and Jadavpur University. Sinha is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing, at Ashoka University, in New Delhi, India.