Subodh Sarkar, a major Indian Bengali poet, editor and Reader
in English at City College, Kolkata, was born in 1958 at Krishnanagar.
His first book of poems was published in the late 70s and now
he has 22 books to his credit - 19 of poems, 2 of 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 a fresh new idiom to
Bengali poetry. He was honoured with the West Bengal Bangla Academy
Award in 2000.
Sarkar has been invited to several International Poetry Festivals
and has read his poetry in Bangladesh, Taiwan (1995), Germany,
France, Czech Republic (2005) and in the USA (1994, 2005, 2006). He
has interviewed major international poets including Allen Ginsberg
in New York, British poet Sir Stephen Spender, Chilean poet Nicanore
Parra and the first black male American Pulitzer prize winner,
Yusef Komunyakaa. He has worked with Danniel Weissbort at Iowa
and Bhopal, and with Chilean poet Raul Jurita in an audio-cassette
project, which highlighted his and Jurita’s poems, the first
of its kind in Indo-Latin American history. Sarkar is the Editor
of Bhashanagar, a Bangla magazine of Indian poetry with occassional
English number.
Married to Mallika Sengupta noted Bengali poet. He lives in Kolkata
and can be reached at subodhmallika@yahoo.co.in.
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