The Sea

About the Author

Currently, Swati Guha is Director of Institute of Language Studies and Research (ILSR), Kolkata, which is affiliated to the Department of Higher Education, Government of West Bengal. Prior to this, Dr. Guha was Director of Nazrul Centre for Social and Cultural Studies, Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol, West Bengal and the Development Officer of Sidho Kanho Birsha University, Purulia, West Bengal. She has long expertise on postcolonial literary and cultural history. Being a scholar of postcolonial literature, Bengali language and literature and an alumnus of Presidency College and Jadavpur University, Kolkata, Dr. Swati Guha has also been an award-winning author. She has focused mostly on issues of gender and development and cultural history. Creative writing is her area of strength and passion. She was also a lecturer at the Department of Bengali, Prafulla Chandra College, Kolkata, West Bengal and has delivered academic lectures at various institutions of India, Bangladesh, UK and USA. Her publications include many novels, short stories and academic monographs on Bengali poetry and Bengali literature.

About the Translator

V. Ramaswamy (1960) is a non-fiction writer and translator based in Kolkata, India. As an activist working for the rights of the labouring poor, Ramaswamy has written about workers, squatters, slums, poverty, housing and resettlement, and has been at the forefront of efforts to envision and initiate the rebuilding of his city from the grassroots.

He has translated the Bengali writers Subimal Misra, Manoranjan Byapari, Adhir Biswas, Shahidul Zahir, Mashiul Alam, Shahaduz Zaman, Swati Guha, Ansaruddin, and Ismail Darbesh, among others.

Ramaswamy received the Toji fellowship in 2015, and the inaugural Literature Across Frontiers – Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship in creative writing and translation at Aberystwyth University, Wales, in 2016. He received the inaugural translation fellowship of the New India Foundation, and the inaugural PEN Presents award in 2022. His translation of Life and Political Reality: Two Novellas, by Shahidul Zahir, was awarded the prize for best translated book for 2022 by the Bangla Translation Foundation (Dhaka). The Nemesis, by Manoranjan Byapari, was shortlisted for the JCB Prize for literature in 2023. Ramaswamy’s final translation of Subimal Misra’s late anti-stories, The Earth Quakes, was published in 2024.

Read more.

Read some of his translation works.

Read V. Ramaswamy’s interview by Hindustan Times..