Sunandan Roy Chowdhury

Sunandan Roy Chowdhury

 Sunandan Roy Chowdhury

Sunandan Roy Chowdhury (b.1969) is a poet, translator, publisher and academic. His most accomplished work is an English translation of Banalata Sen, a book of poetry by Jibanananda Das, the most important Bengali/Indian poet since Rabindranath Tagore.

He has translated Scandinavian literature into Bengali and during his Translators' House Wales residency in January 2013, will be working on a translation of O! Tyn y Gorchudd by Angharad Price (Rebeka jones er katha).

Chupnagar, his first collection of Bengali poems was published in 2012. He writes both in Bengali and English. His poetry has been published in English (The Brown Critique, Delhi and Knot, USA), Finnish (Suomi PEN, Helsinki) and Slovene (Sodobnost, Ljubljana).

A student of history in Presidency College, Calcutta and at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Sunandan holds a doctorate in education, with specialization in Indian higher education policy, from Delhi University. A past fellow of Open Society Institute, Budapest, he has lectured on contemporary India and Europe in universities and institutions in global south and north. He has authored Campus Nation: Student Activism and Social Change in Slovenia, Poland, India and Bangladesh (Worldview, Calcutta, 2006) and was co-editor of Islam and Tolerance in Wider Europe, (CEU Press, New York, 2006). Sunandan has written for Mainstream (New Delhi), Ha’artez (Jerusalem), Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm), Mint (Mumbai), FT.com, and Matrubhumi (Kozhikode).

SAMPARK, the Calcutta based literary-academic publishing house he founded in 1999, is devoted to bringing out English and Indian language translations of literatures from all around the world as well as books in social sciences and humanities. The YOUNG SAMPARK imprint was launched in 2012 to publish children’s books in English and Indian languages.