Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was the fourteenth son of Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi, and started writing early in his life. He joined the Swadeshi Movement against the British in the 1900s. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and used his earnings to partly fund his school and university, Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan. His influence on Bengali culture extends far beyond his highly regarded poetry and prose, into music, visual art, and theatre.

Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern, and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction from Bangladesh and India into English. He also translates fiction from English into Bengali. Over seventy of his translations have been published so far in India, the UK, and the USA. He has won India’s top translation prize, the Crossword Award for translated books, twice. He teaches at Ashoka University, where he is also the co-director of the Ashoka Centre for Translation, and is the Books Editor at Scroll.in.