Translator Arunava Sinha on Sunday received the Distinguished Translator Award 2022 conferred by Vani Foundation at the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is the books editor at Scroll.in.

“The award acknowledges the vital role that translators play in expanding our literary universe,” said poet Ranjit Hoskote, as he congratulated Sinha for the award.

Sinha is an associate professor of creative writing at the Ashoka University and the co-director of Ashoka Centre of Translation. He translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and nonfiction into English as well as from English into Bengali. He has translated over 70 books.

Sinha’s noteworthy translations include fiction titles like Pebblemonkey by Manindra Gupta, The Strange Death of Anindyasundar by Anish Deb, Shameless by Taslima Nasreen and Dozakhnama by Rabisankar Bal. He has also translated non-fiction books like Mamata: Beyond 2021 by Jayanta Ghosal and An Educated Woman in Prostitution by Manada Debi, among others.

Sinha has won the Crossword Translation Award twice for translating Sankar’s Chowringhee in 2007 and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen in 2011. In 2013, he won the Muse India translation award for Buddhadeva Bose’s When The Time Is Right.

He was shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction prize for Chowringhee in 2009, the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative Translated YA Book Prize for his translation of Md Zafar Iqbal’s Rasha.

He was longlisted for the Best Translated Book award 2018 for Bhaskar Chakravarti’s Things That Happen and Other Poems.


Read articles by Arunava Sinha here

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