The Age of Translation
Arunava Sinha, Sangeetha Sreenivasan, Sholeh Wolpe with Udayan Mitra
Arunava Sinha
Bio
Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and nonfiction into English. Seventy-one of his translations have been published so far. Twice the winner of the Crossword translation award, for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), respectively, and the winner of the Muse India translation award (2013) for Buddhadeva Bose’s When The Time Is Right, he has also been shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction prize (2009) for his translation of Chowringhee and for the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative Translated YA Book Prize for his translation of Md Zafar Iqbal’s Rasha, and longlisted for the Best Translated Book award, USA, 2018 for his translation of Bhaskar Chakravarti’s Things That Happen and Other Poems. In 2021, his translation of Taslima Nasrin’s Shameless was shortlisted for the National Translation Award in the USA. Besides India, his translations have been published in the UK and the US in English, and in several European and Asian countries through further translation. He is an associate professor of practice in the Creative Writing department at Ashoka University, and Co-Director, Ashoka Centre of Translation.
Sangeetha Sreenivasan
Bio
Sangeetha Sreenivasan is a novelist and translator who writes in both Malayalam and English. She has recently translated Elena Ferrante’s ‘Days of Abandonment into Malayalam. She has six books to her credit including ‘Acid’ published by Penguin books, India. Her next novel, Salabham, Pookkal, Aeroplane, will be published in September 2018. She has won more than half a dozen awards for her novel including Fokana Award 2018, Thoppil Ravi Award, Malayattoor Prize, Rajalekshmi Award etc.
Sholeh Wolpé
Bio
Sholeh Wolpé is an Iranian-born poet, playwright and librettist. Her literary work includes 6 collections of poetry, several plays, 3 books of translations, and 3 anthologies. Her most recent book, Abacus of Loss, is hailed by Ilya Kaminsky as a book “that created its own genre—a thrill of lyric combined with the narrative spell.”
Wolpé’s translations of Sufi mystic poet, Attar, “The Conference of the Birds” (Norton), and Farrokhzad, “Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad” (UARK) have garnered awards and established her as a celebrated re-creator of Persian poetry into English.
Wolpé wrote the libretto for an oratorio “The Conference of the Birds” and a multi-genre piece, “The Seven Valleys”, which premiered at The Broad Stage and The Getty Villa Museum in
2022.
Wolpé is the recipient of a PEN Heim, Midwest Book Award and Lois Roth Persian Translation prize. Her plays have been finalists and semifinalists at major US festivals.
Wolpé has written for prominent composers and has performed her literary work with world-renowned musicians at venues worldwide.
She has lived in Iran, Trinidad and the UK, and presently divides her time between Los Angeles and Barcelona. Wolpé is the poetry editor of The Markaz Review and is presently a Writer-in-Residence at the University of California, Irvine. website: www.sholehwolpe.com
Udayan Mitra
Bio
Udayan Mitra is Publisher – Literary at HarperCollins Publishers India; he has worked as an editor and publisher at leading Indian publishing houses for the past twenty-two years. At HarperCollins, Udayan publishes an array of literary fiction (under the Fourth Estate and HarperCollins imprints), translations (under the Perennial imprint) and also an eclectic selection of narrative non-fiction titles. He has worked with and published some of the biggest names in Indian publishing, and at HarperCollins has built an award-winning and widely admired list of fiction and non-fiction titles.