Sumana Roy
BornJalpaiguri, West Bengal, India
Occupation
  • Novelist
  • short-story writer
  • poet
  • essayist
NationalityIndian
Alma materSiliguri College, University of North Bengal
Notable works
  • How I Became a Tree (2017)
  • Missing: A Novel (2019)
  • Out of Syllabus (2019)
  • My Mother's Lover and Other Stories
Website
Official website Edit this at Wikidata

Sumana Roy is an Indian writer and poet. Her works include How I Became a Tree (2017), a work of non-fiction; Missing (2019), a novel; Out of Syllabus (2019), a collection of poems; and My Mother's Lover and Other Stories (2019), a short story collection. Her unpublished novel Love in the Chicken's Neck was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize (2008). Her first book, How I Became a Tree, a work of non-fiction, was shortlisted for the 2017 Shakti Bhatt Prize.

Life

Sumana Roy, an associate professor at Ashoka University, is from Siliguri, a city in Darjeeling district of West Bengal, India, where she spent most of her life.[1][2] She studied at Mahbert High School in Siliguri and Pratt Memorial School, Kolkata, after which she went on to study English literature at Siliguri College and the University of North Bengal.[3] She taught English literature at a few government colleges in West Bengal,[4] before she joined Ashoka University as associate professor of English and Creative Writings. She was appointed as the Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich in 2018. She was a Full Time Visiting Fellow at the South Asia Program, Cornell University the same year[5] and a fellow at the Plant Humanities Lab, Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University.[6][7]

Works

Roy writes a monthly column, Treelogy, in The Hindu Business Line about plant life. Her poems and essays are published in Granta, The Caravan, Guernica Himal Southasian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, American Book Review, The White Review Journal of South Asian Studies, Journal of Life Writing.[1][5]

Roy's first work was a novel, Love in the Chicken's Neck, which remains unpublished. It is a story about friendship. Set in the university town of Shibmandir, it moves between Darjeeling, the Dooars, and Siliguri, through their difficult histories, histories of political movements, the demand for Gorkhaland and Kamtapur among them, that affect the relationships between the three friends, Tirna, Nirjhar, and Balram.[8]

She published her first book How I Became a Tree, a non-fiction work, in 2017. With the use of first-person narrative, the book presents various aspects of plant life.[9][10][11] How I Became a Tree was translated into French as Comment Je Suis Devenue Un Arbre by Patrick Devaux.[12] It was translated into German as Wie ich ein Baum wurde by Grete Osterwald.[9]

Her next book, Missing: A Novel (2019), is the modern retelling of the Hindu epic Ramayana.[13] Based on real life incident, 2012 Guwahati molestation of teenage girl, and set over seven days, Missing narrates the story of Kobita, an academic and social activist in her fifties, who goes missing as she goes out to help a girl being molested by thirty men, leaving behind her blind husband and poet Nayan Sengupta along with the domestic helps of Bimalda, Shibhu, Ratan and Bani. The novel deals with the theme of waiting, drawing striking parallels with Ramayana, the epic par excellence that deals with the theme of waiting as well where Sita goes missing and Rama waits for her to get back.[14][15][16] Kobita remains missing throughout the novel.[13]

After Missing: A Novel (2019), Roy published her first poetry collection, Out of Syllabus. The title alludes to the structural framework of her sequence of compositions, the various subjects studied in a school syllabus, with the poems grouped according to the type of lesson taught. Each topic is refracted through the lens of some aspect of the broader social world outside the classroom. Mathematics lends itself to a lyrical reflection on the arithmetic of marriage rules, for example.[17][18]

Out of Syllabus received positively from Stanford University's emerita professor of literature Marjorie Perloff and University of California at Irvine's emeritus professor J. Hillis Miller. For Perloff, Roy's ability to range over a multitude of scientific disciplines – Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Geography, History, Botany and Art – in order to tease out the poignant anatomies of feelings bound up with love, longing and loss while maintaining an aesthetic detachment, was reminiscent of the works of Sylvia Plath, but tempered by a degree of philosophical distance unlike the anger driving Plath's oeuvre. J. Hillis Miller noted the dialectical interplay between the rational order of the book's formal organization as evidenced by the clinical list of syllabus items that groups the poems, and the exuberant figures of speech characteristic of their imagery.[19]

My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories, her short story collection, was published in 2019.[20][21] Roy edited Animalia Indica: The Finest Animal Stories In Indian Literature (2019), a collection of 21 animal short stories written in English as well translated from native vernacular languages.[22][23]

Awards and nominations

Roy's unpublished novel Love in the Chicken’s Neck was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize (2008).[24][25] Her first book, How I Became a Tree, a work of non-fiction, was shortlisted for the 2017 Shakti Bhatt Prize.[26] It was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Award for the year 2019 and 2020.[27][28]

References

  1. 1 2 "Sumana Roy". New Writing. Archived from the original on 25 January 2021. Retrieved 8 July 2021.
  2. ↑ Roy, Sumana (13 May 2016). "Living in the Chicken's Neck". The Hindu Business Line. Retrieved 9 July 2021.
  3. ↑ "Becoming a tree to going missing - An Author's Afternoon with Sumana Roy, presented by Shree Cement, with t2". Telegraph India. 26 July 2018. Archived from the original on 11 July 2021. Retrieved 8 July 2021.
  4. ↑ "Man is mandir: 'My friend Sancho' by Amit Varma and 'Arzee the dwarf' by Chandrahas Choudhary". Himal Southasian. 1 December 2009. Archived from the original on 11 July 2021. Retrieved 9 July 2021.
  5. 1 2 "Ashoka University". Archived from the original on 8 May 2019. Retrieved 11 July 2021.
  6. ↑ "Plant Humanities Faculty Resident". Archived from the original on 10 June 2021. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
  7. ↑ "Open Minds 2021: Soft Power". Open/. 25 June 2021. Archived from the original on 12 July 2021. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
  8. ↑ "The 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize - Longlist Announced" (PDF). Man Asia Literary Prize. Archived from the original (PDF) on 20 August 2011. Retrieved 11 July 2021.
  9. 1 2 Lüdenbac, Clair. "Buchkritik: Sumana Roy, Wie ich ein Baum wurde". Faust Kultur (in German). Archived from the original on 19 January 2021. Retrieved 11 July 2021.
  10. ↑ Barman, Rini (20 March 2017). "'How I Became a Tree' is an Ode to All That is Neglected". The Wire. Archived from the original on 22 February 2020. Retrieved 11 July 2021.
  11. ↑ Baishya, Amit R. (26 April 2017). Simon, Daniel (ed.). "How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy". World Literature Today. Archived from the original on 22 May 2021. Retrieved 8 July 2021.
  12. ↑ Devaux, Patrick. "Comment je suis devenue un arbre, Sumana Roy (par Patrick Devaux)". La Cause Litteraire (in French). Archived from the original on 16 January 2021. Retrieved 9 July 2021.
  13. 1 2 Ray, Sumit (17 October 2018). Simon, Daniel (ed.). "Missing by Sumana Roy". World Literature Today. Archived from the original on 11 July 2021. Retrieved 6 July 2021.
  14. ↑ Nagpal, Payal; Narayan, Shyamala A. (2019). "India". The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 54 (4): 614. doi:10.1177/0021989419877061. ISSN 0021-9894. S2CID 220087990.
  15. ↑ Gopalan, Pradeep (September 2017). "More Than Just A Disappearance". The Book Review. New Delhi: The Book Review Literary Trust. 41 (9). OCLC 564170386. Archived from the original on 11 July 2021. Retrieved 11 July 2021.
  16. ↑ Ahmad, Ashwin (17 June 2018). "Book Review: Missing". DNA India. Archived from the original on 20 September 2019. Retrieved 8 July 2021.
  17. ↑ Nagpal, Payal; Narayan, Shyamala A. (2020). "India". The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 55 (4): 592. doi:10.1177/0021989420962768. ISSN 0021-9894. S2CID 227276024.
  18. ↑ Ray, Kunal (24 August 2019). "Review: Out of Syllabus by Sumana Roy". Hindustan Times. Archived from the original on 12 July 2021. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
  19. ↑ Roy, S. (2019). Out of Syllabus: Poems. Speaking Tiger Books. ISBN 978-93-88874-60-1. Retrieved 9 July 2021.
  20. ↑ Mukherjee, Anusua (15 February 2020). "Review of Sumana Roy's 'My Mother's Lover and Other Stories'". The Hindu. Archived from the original on 22 June 2020. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
  21. ↑ Jain, Saudamini (28 May 2020). "Review: My Mother's Lover and Other Stories by Sumana Roy". Hindustan Times. Archived from the original on 2 July 2021. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
  22. ↑ Lenin, Janaki (24 August 2019). "'Animalia Indica' edited by Sumana Roy, reviewed by Janaki Lenin". The Hindu. Archived from the original on 1 November 2020. Retrieved 8 July 2021.
  23. ↑ Bhattacharya, Bibek (9 August 2019). "Can animals tell their stories?". Mint. Archived from the original on 10 August 2019. Retrieved 8 July 2021.
  24. ↑ "2008 Prize". Man Asian Literary Prize. Archived from the original on 24 July 2011.
  25. ↑ "The 'Asian Booker' Longlist 2008". The Daily Star. 9 August 2008. Retrieved 9 July 2021.
  26. ↑ "These are the six books shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize 2017". Hindustan Times. 21 August 2017. Archived from the original on 5 January 2018. Retrieved 8 July 2021.
  27. ↑ "Sahitya Akademi Award 2019" (PDF). Sahitya Akademi. 21 January 2020. Archived (PDF) from the original on 27 November 2020. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
  28. ↑ "Sahitya Akademi Award 2020" (PDF). Sahitya Akademi. 12 March 2021. Archived (PDF) from the original on 13 March 2021. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
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