‘Essential to ignore political correctness when writing’: French-language writer Shumona Sinha

Shumona Sinha was born and grew up in Kolkata, West Bengal. In 1990 she won Bengal’s Best Young Poet award. She started learning French at the age of 22 and moved to Paris a few years later. She has since been naturalised French.

Her first novel, Fenêtre sur l’abîme, was published in 2008. Her second novel, Assommons les pauvres!, was published in 2011 and subsequently translated into German, Arabic, Italian and Hungarian, and adapted for stage in Germany and Austria. It was translated into English as Down With the Poor! by Teresa Lavender Fagan and published in 2022. Her third novel, Calcutta (2014), received the Prix du rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises and the Grand Prix du Roman of the Société des gens de lettres. Her most recent novel, Le testament russe, was published in March 2020 by Éditions Gallimard.

She has also translated and published several anthologies of contemporary French and Bengali poetry in collaboration with her former husband, the poet Lionel Ray.

In a conversation hosted by the Jaipur Literature Festival, Sinha spoke about why French is her chosen, being a politically incorrect writer, and how writing has not exactly been cathartic for her. Excerpts from the conversation:

You were born and grew up...

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