Songs of Tagore

Aruna Chakravarti was Principal of Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi. She is also a well-known academic, writer and translator and has contributed widely for national and international journals. Her volume of translated stories from the masters of contemporary Bengali fiction entitled The Way Home appeared in 2006. Her first attempt at creative writing a novel The Inheritors, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2004. Secret Spaces, a volume of her own short stories, was published in April 2010.She has also contributed a piece The Broken Nest, a translation of Rabindranath Tagore s novella Nashta Needh to the volume entitled The Essential Tagore and a simultaneous volume of the same name by Visva-Bharati. Among her forthcoming publications is Jorasanko a novel based on the lives of the women of the Tagore family. Aruna Chakravarti is the recipient of several prestigious awards. Among them are the Vaitalik Award, the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize and the Sarat Puraskar.

Late Sunil Gangopadhyay was one of the most illustrious literary figures in the world of Bengali literature. A critically acclaimed poet and a best-selling novelist and writer, he had penned eighteen novels, numerous collections of poems, children’s books, short stories and essays. Many of his novels have been translated into English and there have been cinematic adaptations of his works as well. He was the founder editor of Krittibas, a groundbreaking Bengali poetry journal and joint editor of the reputed Bengali literary magazine, Desh. He had attended several international literary conferences and had won many prestigious awards including Ananda Puraskar (1972 and 1989), Sahitya Akademi Award (1985) and Saraswati Samman (2005). He had been elected president of the Sahitya Akademi and is a visiting professor at Visva-Bharati University.