Flaming Flowers Volume 1

About the Authors

Shaheen Akhtar is a Bangladeshi short story writer and novelist. She received the Bangla Academy Literary Award (2015) for her contributions to literature and the Asian Literary Award (2020) for her novel Talash. Talash was translated into English (as The Search) and published by Zubaan, Delhi, in 2011. Her another novel Beloved Rongomala, translated by Shabnam Nadiya, was published in 2022 by Eka, an imprint of Westland Books, a division of Nasadiya Technologies Private Limited. Her short stories have been published in Words without Borders and other prestigious literary magazines. Akhtar’s works have been translated into English, German, and Korean.

Anita Agnihotri’s literary oeuvre spans across all genrespoetry, novels, writing for children, and critiques of development; but short story is the genre that stimulates her creative vein the most. She has authored over 40 volumes by now and has received several awards, including the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad felicitation, the Sarat Puraskar, Pratibha Basu Sahitya Puraskar, and the Bhuban Mohini Dasi Gold Medal by the University of Calcutta. She received the Crossword Economist Award for the English collection of stories, Seventeen, along with translator Arunava Sinha. She served in the Indian Administrative Service for 37 years and retired as Social Justice Secretary of India. Her writings explore the vast and complex Indian reality, many facets of human relations, and bring out the unheard voices of the marginalised and the underprivileged, and have been translated into several Indian languages, English, and also into German and Swedish.

Nasreen Jahan (born in 1966) is a Bangladeshi writer and literary editor. She came to notice with the publication of her novel The Woman Who Flew: Urukku in 1993. Jahan was born and brought up in Mymensingh. She joined the Chander Hat, a national children’s and juvenile organisation, in 1974 and started to write rhymes and short stories on the children’s page of the daily newspaper Dainik Bangla. She was profusely encouraged by Literary Editor Late Ahsan Habib, who was also a top-brass poet of Bangladesh. Later, she concentrated on short stories and published in all leading literary papers and magazines of the country, including the Kishore Bangla.

Papree Rahman (b. 1965) is a noted writer from Dhaka, Bangladesh. She graduated from Dhaka University and got engaged in writing apart from doing freelance journalism. She has many collections of short stories, and among these, Lilies, Lanterns and Lullabies is a compilation of translated short stories (selected). Her notable novels include Bayan (2008), Palatia (2011) and Nadidhara Abasik Elaka (2019). Papree also edited many important magazines and anthologies. The total number of her published books is 35.

Born in North Bengal, Tilottama Majumdar is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, poet, lyricist, and essayist. Owing to her childhood spent in tea plantations, her writings bring out the profundity in seemingly banal and ubiquitous scenes of everyday life. Her published books include Vasudhārā, Ektara: Strains of a Lonesome String, Rri, among others.

A student and professor of English Literature, Prativa Sarkar is mostly known for her short stories and political essays. Ecological issues are part of her interests as well. Her much-lauded collection of short stories based on subaltern crises, Farishta O Meyera has been published by Guruchandali Publication. She is definitely one of the known names among Bengali women writers, and her contribution to Bengali literature is noteworthy.

Born and brought up in a Calcutta suburb, Indrani Datta is an expatriate writer who started discovering her writing skill after landing on a distant shore. While on an incessant mission of searching for the magic words to connect with the readers, Indrani authored two collections of short stories and one novel.

About the Translators

Shamita Das Dasgupta is a cofounder of Manavi, the first organization to focus on violence against South Asian women in the U.S. She has taught Psychology, Gender Studies, and Clinical Law at the Rutgers University and NYU, authored five books, written several academic papers and monographs, and is still conducting training for DV and SV practitioners in the U.S. and India. In her retirement, she is enjoying writing mystery stories in Bengali.

Rituparna Mukherjee is a faculty of English and Communication Studies at Jogamaya Devi College, under the University of Calcutta. Her masters in English Literature is from University of Calcutta and her MPhil is from Jadavpur University. She is currently pursuing Doctoral degree in Gendered Mobilities in West African and Afro- Diasporic Literature at IIIT Bhubaneswar. She is a published poet, short fiction writer and a passionate translator. She translates Bengali and Hindi fiction into English and is an editor at The Antonym Magazine. She is also an ELT trainer, consultant and ESL author outside of her work and research schedule.

Dr. Malini Mukherjee is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Shri Shikshayatan College, Kolkata since 1999 till date. She did her Graduation, Masters, M.Phil and Ph.D. in English Literature from Jadavpur University. A passionate translator, she has done translation works for Sahitya Akademi. Her other interests are music, classical dance and books.

Subarna Banerjee is a writer based in Kolkata, India. She loves stories of all kinds be it in books, video games, music or on the screen but her own pen has a fondness for short stories and poems. After finishing her masters degree in English Literature from Jadavpur University, she is currently freelancing as an editor and translator. In her spare time, she likes to scribble ideas in her journal and listen to kpop.

Ananya Sasaru, A PhD scholar at the Department of English, University of Calcutta is working on Post WWII European Cinema and Architectural Philosophy. She completed her graduation from Bethune College in 2013 and masters degree from the University of Calcutta in 2015. She studied the ethical and political aspects of female mental illness in the works of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Charlotte Perkins Gilman for her M.Phil thesis. She is a lecturer of English and has two publications in peerreviewed journals and several seminars, both in India and abroad. Her area of research interest includes gender studies, film studies, modernism, postmodernism, and literary theory.

Sukti Sarkar retired as an Assistant Manager of the Reserve Bank of India. Interested in literature and history, she is a passionate traveler and a theater worker based out of Kolkata. She volunteers often for social/community causes organized by NGOs in the city. Apart from contributing book reviews in little magazines, she is currently trying literary translation.

Kathakali Jana, a journalist-turned-administrator with an arts organization,she is an arts writer and dance reviewer. A former student of English literature, she enjoys the challenges of translating literary texts.

About the Editor

A bilingual writer and translator, Bishnupriya Chowdhuri holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida, USA. She completed her Masters in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, and has Bachelor’s degree in English literature from Burdwan University, India.

She translates short fictions, creative nonfiction, memoirs and experimental-lyrical prose from Bengali to English. She has edited two anthologies of translated short-stories. Her first translated novel “No One as Rano Biswas” came out in 2023. She lives in Pune with her daughter and loves to paint.

Read some of her translation and other works.