Subodh Sarkar is a Bengali poet, writer and editor, and a reader in English literature at City College, Kolkata. He is a recipient of the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award.
Biography
Subodh Sarkar, born in 1958, is a noted Indian Bengali poet, editor, translator and Associate Professor in English at City College, Calcutta University. His first book of poems was published in the late 70s and now he has 29 books to his credit- 26 books of poems, 2 translations and one travelogue on America. Critics find his poetry "incisive, provocative, satiric, manipulative, and most of all, entertainingly contemporary". They credit him for bringing in a fresh new idiom to Bengali poetry. He received the West BengalBangla Academy Award for poetry in 2000. His PhD is on the hyphenated identities of Indian American women writers writing in English. Sarkar has participated in several International Poetry Festivals and read his poetry and papers at Taiwan, Germany, France, USA and Czech Republic in 2005/6. Invited by IWP, University of Iowa he participated in the New Symposium at Paros, a Greek Island, in 2007. He visited Russia and Turkey as a member of the Indian Writers’ delegation organized by Sahitya Academy in 2010. He has interviewed major international poets including Allen Ginsberg at New York, British poet Sir Stephen Spender, Chilean poet Nicanore Parra and the first black male American Pulitzer prize winner poet, Yusuf Komunyakaa. He has worked with Danniel Weissbort at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal for translation and with Chilean poet Raul Jurita for an audio-CD project which highlighted his and Jurita's poems,the first of its kind in Indo-Latin American history of poetry. Sarkar and Mallika Sengupta,his wife, an eminent poet, jointly edited Bhashanagar till 2011 when she passed away. Sarkar is former Editor of Indian Literature, Sahitya Academy, New Delhi. Recently participated atIFOA, International Festival of Authors, Toronto, Canada and a Reading with Usef Komuniayaaka at the Academy of American poetry at Manhattan, New York. Recipient of National Sahitya Academy Award 2013 and Nazrul Award from Kabi Sangshad Bangladesh 2014.His first book of poem was published in the late 1970s, and now he has 26 books to his credit – 20 of poems, two of translations and one travelogue on America. His poems have been translated into English, French and several Indian languages and published in several journals and anthologies. Sarkar is the editor of Bhashanagar, a Bengali culture magazine with occasional English issues. In 2010 he was appointed as the guest editor of Indian Literature, the flagship journal of Sahitya Akademi. He married Mallika Sengupta who was also a poet. He has published 29 books in Bengali and 4 books in English. Recipient of Bangabhushan from the Govt. of West Bengal D.Lit from G.B.University, W.Bengal Gangadhar Meher National Award from Sambalpur University 2016 Chairman : Kobita Academy, Government of West Bengal In 2016, he was a Fulbright visiting professor of English at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, IA.
