Bio
Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty is lecturer in postcolonial theory at the University of Western Sydney and teaches/publishes on literatures of the subcontinent, in English and in translation, on issues of identity politics and multiculturalism and Bombay cinema. Her latest edited collection of essays, Being Bengali: at home and in the world (Routledge 2013), is an enquiry into the socio-intellectual history of this eclectic linguistic group from Eastern India. She has co-edited A Treasury of Bangla Stories (Srishti 1999) and her translations have appeared in The Table is Laid: the Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing, The Lotus Singers: Stories from Contemporary South Asia, The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, The Bell and Other Stories and The Wordsmiths. She is the recipient of an AK Ramanujan Award for the most felicitous translations from two Indian languages, Bangla and Hindi, into English. In the recent years, Mridula has facilitated literary exchange between Australia and India through ALIF: Australia India Literatures International Forum (Sydney 2012) and a tri-nation Autumn School in Literary Translation (Kolkata 2013), where Nunga poet Ali Cobby Eckermann’s work was translated into Bangla. She is currently curating the project Literary Commons! which takes 14 Indigenous writers to Indian literary festivals 2014-2015, and seeks to make personal and publishing connections between Indigenous and Dalit literatures.