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Saratchandra Chattopadhyay was born on 15 September 1876 in Devanandapur, a village of West Bengal. He grew up in dire poverty and received very little formal education. After spending some of his youth in Bhagalpur and Muzaffarpur, Saratchandra left for Burma in 1903, and it was from Burma that he began to send his stories and novels to magazines in Kolkata. Sensitive and daring, Saratchandra’s writings captivated the hearts and minds of readers, and he soon became Bengal’s most popular novelist. Saratchandra returned to Kolkata in 1916, and dedicated himself to writing. He was India’s first successful professional writer – a person who earned his entire livelihood only from writing. He died in 1938. Saratchandra remains one of the best-loved Indian novelists of all time; his works have been translated into various languages and made into films as well. Among his best-known novels are Srikanta, Devdas, Palli Samaj, Parineeta, Charitraheen, Grihadaha and Pather Dabi.

Sreejata Gupta has an MA in Comparative Literature from State University of New York at Stony Brook. She has worked as a translator and editor with Stree Publication, Seagull Books and Jacaranda Press. She has previously translated Picture Imperfect, a collection of Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi stories, Taslima Nasrin’s Novel French Lover and Saratchandra Chhattopadhyay’s Devdas for Penguin. Her translation of Tagore’s Home and the World is forthcoming in penguin.

Malobika Chaudhuri runs Mono Translation Bureau, a multi-lingual translation agency, in Kolkata. Her translations of several of Saratchandra’s novels are forthcoming.

Aruna Chakravarti is a well-known academic, writer and translator. Prominent among her many publications are her translations of Saratchandra Chatterjee’s Srikanta and Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Sei Samai (Those Days) and its sequel Pratham Also (First Light), published by Penguin Books India in 1993, 1997 and 2001 respectively. She is the recipient of several awards, among them the Vaitalik Award (1986), the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award (1996) and the Sarat Puraskar (2004). Her first novel, The Inheritors, was published by Penguin Books India to critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2004.