Ketaki Kushari Dyson was born in Calcutta in 1940 and educated at Calcutta and Oxford. In 1963 she became the first Indian woman to gain a First in English Literature at Oxford. She also has a doctorate from Oxford. Based in Britain since her marriage to an Englishman, she maintains close links with the literary life of her native city and is regarded as a significant Bengali writer of her generation. She writes in both Bengali and English, and has published thirty titles in a diversity of genres. She belongs to that very small minority of poets who write original poetry in two languages, and she also translates between her two languages in both directions.

In Bengali her publications include six full-length collections of poetry, three novels, three plays, two collections of essays, and translations of Anglo-Saxon poetry into alliterative half-lines. Her plays have been staged in both Britain and India.

She has published three full-length poetry collections in English: Sap-Wood (Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1978), Spaces I Inhabit (Navana, Calcutta, 1983), and Memories of Argentina and Other Poems (Virgilio Libro, Kidlington, 1999). In between the first two titles there was a poetry pamphlet, Hibiscus in the North (Old Fire Station Poets series, Mid-Day Publications, Oxford, 1979), the poems of which were incorporated into Spaces I Inhabit. A fourth English collection, In That Sense You Touched It, is forthcoming later this year from Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi (India’s National Academy of Letters); this entire collection is being incorporated as the first section of a diptych or double-decker poetry volume, along with the work of another Indian woman poet, to mark Sahitya Akademi’s Golden Jubilee Year.

Her literary translations include Anglo-Saxon Kabita (translations of Anglo-Saxon poems into Bengali, Navana, Calcutta, 1987), I Won’t Let You Go: Selected Poems of Rabindranath Tagore (Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1991, a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation), Selected Poems of Buddhadeva Bose (OUP Delhi, 2003), and the translation of her own play Raater Rode (Night’s Sunlight, Virgilio Libro, Kidlington, 2000), which was produced in Britain as a Millennium Festival Project.

Her scholarly publications include A Various Universe: A Study of the Journals and Memoirs of British Men and Women in the Indian Subcontinent 1765-1856 (OUP Delhi, 1978, reissued 2002); In Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo, (Sahitya Akademi, 1988); and in collaboration with others, Ronger Rabindranath (Ananda Publishers, 1997), a detailed study of the effects of Tagore’s protanopic colour vision on his writings and visual art.

She has received the Ananda Puraskar from Calcutta twice and the Bhubanmohini Dasi Medal of the University of Calcutta for ‘eminent contribution’ to contemporary Bengali letters. She has just finished preparing her third collection of Bengali essays for the press. Further information on her is available from her website at: http://www.ketaki.dyson.dial.pipex.com