Shumona Sinha

In 1990, she received Bengali's Best Young Poet Award; she moved to Paris in 2001, where she gained an M-Phil in French language and literature from the Sorbonne University. In 2008 she published her first novel Fenêtre sur l'abîme. She has translated and published several anthologies of Bengali and French poetry, together with her ex-husband, the writer Lionel Ray.[3]

In 2011, her second novel, Assommons les pauvres !, was published at Éditions de l'Olivier, which won her the Prix Valery-Larbaud 2012 and the Prix Populiste in 2011; it was shortlisted for the Prix Renaudot.

The novel has become a part of scholarly programs to discuss the questions on identity, exile, writing as a woman, writing in a foreign language, the relationship between the literature and the politics, at the Notre Dame University at Chicago, course conducted by Alison Rice, at the American University in Paris by Anne-Marie Picard and at Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales by Tirthankar Chanda.[4][5]

In her third novel Calcutta, published in January 2014, Shumona Sinha goes down the memory lane of a Bengali family to describe the violent political history of West Bengal and is rewarded by the Grand Prix du Roman de la Société des Gens de Lettres and Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises de L'Académie française.[6] [7] [8]

Her fourth novel "Apatride"/Stateless, published in January 2017, is a parallèle portrait of two Bengali women, one living in a village near Calcutta, caught up in a peasant insurrection and a romantic misadventure with her cousin, causing her perish; the other one living in Paris, in a post-CharlieHebdo society, fragmented, where prevails racism of all the colors.  · [9].

In Le testament russe, her fifth novel, published in March 2020 by Gallimard (Blanche), she describes the fascination of a young bengali girl, Tania, for a Russian Jewish editor in 1920 who was the founder editor of Raduga Publishers. [10] · [11]  · [12].

Books of Shumona Sinha have been translated into German, Italian, Hungarian and Arab; English translation of "Calcutta" is published by SSP, Delhi, November 2019. "Assommons les pauvres" is adapted by several theaters in Germany and in Austria, specially by Thalia Theater at Hambourg[13] and the Freies Werkstatt theater at Cologne[14].

• Fenêtre sur l'abîme; 2008, Éditions de La Difference
• Assommons les pauvres !; 2011, Éditions de l'Olivier
• Calcutta, 2014; Éditions de l'Olivier
• Apatride, 2017; Éditions de l'Olivier
• Le Testament russe, 2020; Gallimard (Blanche)

• 2012 : Prix Valery-Larbaud
• 2011 : Prix Eugène Dabit du roman populiste
• 2014 : Grand prix du roman de la Société des gens de lettres
• 2014 : Prix du rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises de l'Académie française
• 2016 : Internationaler Literaturpreis

• Shumona Sinha: "J'écris comme je crache" (French)
• Shumona Sinha und die Migration in Frankreich: Zornige Zeugenschaft (German)
• Tales from France's immigration office win German International Literature Award
• Lit prize winner Shumona Sinha: 'As a writer, I search for the truth'