Shumona Sinha
Shumona Sinha ( Bengali সুমনা সিনহা Sumanā Sinahā ; born January 1, 1973 in Calcutta , West Bengal ) is an Indian - French writer and interpreter. She writes in French. Her novels have not yet appeared in India.
Life
Early years
Shumona Sinha grew up in her native Calcutta in a literarily open-minded family environment. In 1990, the then 17-year-old Bengali received the Best Young Poet Award . Already at the age of fifteen she happened upon a travelogue that Sunil Gangopadhyay wrote about France . The weekly columns that this well-known Bengali poet wrote for a local newspaper sparked her interest in French culture early on; In 2001, on the occasion of a recruitment campaign by the French Embassy, she successfully applied for a position as an English teacher in Paris, where she has lived since 2001 and taught in secondary schools for eight years.
In 2009 she took on a job in Paris as an interpreter for refugees from Bengal at the French migration authority, which she soon lost when her novel Assommons les pauvres! ("Slay the poor!") Appeared. In the novel, Bengali immigrants in particular come off badly at first sight. The scandalous novel about the inalienability of the asylum system caused a scandal. In it Shumona Sinha relentlessly traces the realities of life of migrants in France. It is a sweeping blow in which everyone involved in the immigration system gets their fat, the petitioners as well as those who have bureaucratic power over human lives.
Awards
For Assommons les pauvres! , whose provocative title is borrowed from a prose poem by Charles Baudelaire , she received the Prix du roman populiste in 2011 and the Prix littéraire Valery Larbaud in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Médicis . In 2016, she and her translator, Lena Müller, received the International Culture Prize in Germany, endowed with a total of 35,000 euros, for the German edition of the same novel .
In 2008 she presented her literary debut novel with the novel Fenêtre sur l'Abîme (“Window over the Abyss”). She has also published several volumes of poetry in French and Bengali and edited several anthologies with her ex-husband, the writer Lionel Ray , with whom she was married for eight years .
Her third novel Calcutta ("Kalkutta"), which appeared in German in August 2016, tells of the protagonist's return to her empty home. Calcutta researches the history and living conditions in the city of origin. In 2014 she received the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature française of the Académie française and the Grand Prix du Roman de la Société des gens de lettres .
Others
Shumona Sinha holds a Masters of Philosophy from the Sorbonne University in French literature and linguistics . From July 1, 2016, she lived in Zurich for five months as “ Writer in Residence ” at the Literaturhaus Zurich .
Works (selection)
- Fenêtre sur l'abîme . Novel. Editions de La Difference 2008
-
Assommons les pauvres! . Novel. Éditions de l'Olivier 2011
- Slay the poor! . Novel. Translated by Lena Müller , Edition Nautilus , Hamburg 2015 ISBN 978-3-89401-820-7
- Extract: blue, white, red. France tells. Ed. Olga Mannheimer. dtv, Munich 2017 ISBN 9783423261524 pp. 279–285
-
Calcutta . Novel. Editions de l'Olivier 2014
- Calcutta . Novel. Translated by Lena Müller, Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2016 ISBN 978-3-96054-010-6
-
Apatride . Novel. Éditions de l'Olivier, Paris, 2017
- Stateless . Novel. Translated by Lena Müller, Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2017 ISBN 978-3-96054-047-2
Web links
- An interview with Shumona Sinha: “There are no compromises in the text” , NZZ - long interview July 30, 2016
- Slip through the mesh of the net . faz.net of December 21, 2015
- Spit outrage . Tagesanzeiger , July 22, 2016
- Video: "Scandal" - novel describes dilemma in asylum authorities , ttt - title, thesen, temperamente , ARD, broadcast December 13, 2015
- Laudation for the International Literature Prize, in Translation , magazine in the Association of German-speaking Translators of Literary and Scientific Works , VdÜ. 2, 2016 (July - December), by Sabine Peschel: International Literature Prize to Shumona Sinha and Lena Müller
- With the power of language. Translator from Trier receives the International Literature Prize , volksfreund.de , from Annemarie Heucher in Berlin , June 15, 2016
- Shumona Sinha reads from "Stateless" on Dichterlesen.net , German reading of excerpts as audio file, voice Miriam Japp . Event on October 24, 2017 in the Literaturhaus Basel , with an English conversation with Isabelle Chariatte Fels, with a discussion with the audience
Individual evidence
- ↑ Date of birth on birthdayes.com ( Memento from July 31, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). Accessed December 4, 2019
- ↑ a b Shumona Sinha in conversation: “There are no compromises in the text” , NZZ, July 30, 2016, accessed July 31, 2016
- ↑ Shumona Sinha and migration in France: Angry testimony , NZZ from December 3, 2015, accessed July 31, 2016
- ↑ books de IT and Production: Slay the poor! Retrieved May 26, 2020 .
- ↑ Shumona Sinha and Lena Müller receive the 2016 International Literature Prize , Börsenblatt.net June 14, 2016, accessed July 31, 2016
- ↑ International Literature Prize: Novel "Erschlagt die Armen!" excellent , Der Spiegel from June 14, 2016, accessed July 31, 2016
- ↑ Poetry anthologies in Bengali, French and Spanish (French), accessed July 31, 2016
- ↑ 2014 Mme Shumona SINHA: médaille de vermeil , Académie française , accessed July 31, 2016 (French)
- ↑ Sinha is recipient of the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature française and the Grand Prix du Roman ( Memento of July 31, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), European Writers' Conference, accessed December 4, 2019 (English)
- ↑ https://www.writers-in-residence.ch/de/home/shumona_sinha
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Sinha, Shumona |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Sinha, Sumana |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Indo-French writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1st January 1973 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Calcutta , West Bengal |