The Author Shamsur Rahman (1929-2006) was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh and educated at Dhaka University. He spent his working life as a journalist, but always found time for his poetic vocation. He published about seventy volumes of verse and a number of prose works, and received the highest literary and state honours of his country, among them the Bangla Academy Prize, the Ekushey Medal and the Independence Award. In 2001 he became the first recipient of the SAARC Award for Lifetime Achievement. He also received several honorary D.Litt degrees, from the universities of Rabindra Bharati, Viswabharati (Santiniketan), Jadavpur and North Bengal. The Translator Kaiser Haq was born in Dhaka and educated at the universities of Dhaka (MA) and Warwick (PhD), where he was a Commonwealth Scholar. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar and Vilas Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and held a fellowship from the Royal Literary Fund at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He is currently professor of English at Dhaka University and Adjunct Professor at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULA8). Described by the Journal of Commonwealth Literature as “Bangladesh’s leading English-language poet, he has published seven collections of his own poetry, most recently Published in the Streets of Dhaka: Collected Poems (Dhaka: UPL). He has translated Rabindranath Tagore’s Chaturanga as Quartet (Heinemann and Penguin India), the 18th century travel memoir The Wonders of ViIayet (Leeds: Peepal Tree, Delhi: Chronicle Books and Dhaka: writers.ink), Nasreen Jahan’s Urukkoo as The Woman Who Flew (Penguin India), and Anis Choudhury’s The Perfect Model and Other Stories (Dhaka: writers.ink). He has edited Contemporary Indian Poetry (Ohio State University Press), and Padma Meghna Jamuna: Modern Poetry from Bangladesh (Delhi: SAARC Foundation). His prose retelling of the Manasa legends, The Triumph of the Snake Goddess has been published by Harvard University Press. Selections of Haq’s poetry have been translated into French (Combien de Bouddhas, Traductions par Olivier Litvine, Editions Caracteres, Paris) and Oriya (translated by Sangram Jena). Haq has won the Bangla Academy Award for Translation.
