In Conversation with Sanjukta Dasgupta

Abstract

Sanjukta Dasgupta, Professor and Former Head, Dept of English and Ex- Dean, Faculty of Arts, Calcutta University, teaches English and American literature along with New Literatures in English. She is a poet, critic and translator, and her articles, poems, short stories and translations have been published in journals of distinction in India and abroad.Her inner sphere overlaps the outer on the speculative and the shadowy. There is a sublime inwardness in her poems. Her recent signal books include Snapshots, Dilemma, First Language, More Light, and Lakshmi Unbound. She co-authored Radical Rabindranath: Nation, Family, Gender: Post-colonial Readings of Tagore’s Fiction and Film, and she is the Managing Editor of Families: A Journal of Representations.She has received many grants and awards, including Fulbright fellowships and residencies and an Australia India Council Fellowship. Now she is the Convener, English Board, Shaitya Akademi. Professor Dasgupta has visited Nepal and Bangladesh as a member of the SAARC Writers Delegation, and has served as a co-judge and Chairperson for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia region). She has visited Melbourne and Malta to serve on the pan-Commonwealth jury panel. She is now an e-member of the advisory committee of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, UK. She is Visiting Professor, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, and she is the President of the Executive Committee, Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library in Kolkata.The interview was conducted via email in December 2018.