There are many ways to travel between India and the UK in general, and Calcutta and Norwich in particular. You could take a plane and then the bus or the train, or perhaps a taxi. You could even sail. But what if you traveled via literature instead? In Writing Places you will find such a journey. This collection draws together stories, poems, photographs, memoirs, confessions, and investigations from some of the most imaginative writers and photographers working in the UK and India today to create a journey between the two lands that you can savor with your mind, heart, and even body. A unique work for armchair travelers, Writing Places lets us move between two countries that share a long history in a first-of-its-kind collection of words and images.

Winner of an English PEN award With her days split between a passionate marriage and a high-octane television studio job, Homi is a thoroughly modern young woman - until one day she is approached by a yogi in the street. This mysterious figure begins to follow her everywhere, visible only to Homi, who finds him both frightening and inexplicably arousing. Convinced that the yogi is a manifestation of fate, Homi embarks on a series of increasingly desperate attempts to prove that her life is ruled by her own free will, much to the alarm of her no-nonsense husband and cattily snobbish mother. Her middle-class Kolkata life, and the relationships that define her identity, are disturbed to the point of disintegration. Following the inexorable pull of tradition, the mystic forces that run beneath the shallow surface of our modern existence like red earth beneath the pavements, Homi ends up in Benaras, the holy city on the banks of the Ganga, where her final battle with fate plays out.

A strong and courageous novel that deftly tackles psychosis. In Melbourne, Australia, a woman in her late thirties is diagnosed with her third episode of psychosis, amounting to schizophrenia. What follows is a frenzied journey from home to a community house to a hospital and out again. Sanya, the protagonist, finds herself questioning the diagnosis of her sanity or insanity, as determined and defined by a medical model which seems less than convincing to her. Having studied psychology herself, she wonders whether, even if the diagnosis is correct to some extent, the treatment should be different. Sanya tells her story in a deceptively calm, first-person voice, using conversations as the primary narrative mode, as she ponders if and when the next psychotic episode will materialize. Based on real-life events and originally written in Bengali, Hospital is a daring first novel that unflinchingly depicts the precarity of a woman living with psychosis and her struggles with the definition of sanity in our society.  

Bangladesh in 1971 showed vividly, and terribly, the deadly effects of war. Piles of corpses, torture cells, ash and destruction everywhere in the wake of the Pakistani army's attacks on Bengali people. Blue Venom and Forbidden Incense, two novellas by Bangladeshi writer Syed Shamsul Haq, bear bleak witness to the mindless violence and death of that period. Blue Venom tells of a middle-aged middle manager who is arrested and taken to a cell, where he is slowly tortured to death for being a namesake of a rebel poet Kazi Nazrul Islam. Forbidden Incense, meanwhile, tells of a woman's return to her paternal village after her husband was taken by the army. In the village, she meets a boy with a Muslim name whose entire family has been killed; as they attempt together to gather and bury scattered corpses, they, too, are caught by the killers.

Bengali writer Riza Rahman is the author of more than fifty novels, as well as countless short stories, set in Bangladesh and bringing to life the difficult, mostly forgotten lives of its poorest and most disadvantaged citizens. Letters of Blood is set in the often violent world of prostitution in Bangladesh. Rahman brings great sensitivity and insight to her chronicles of the lives of women trapped in that bleak world as they face the constant risk of physical abuse, disease, and pregnancy, while also all too often struggling with drug addiction. A powerful, unforgettable story, Letters of Blood shows readers a hard way of life, imbuing the stories of these women with unforgettable empathy and compassion.

Ruhiton Kurmi has been in jail for seven years. Once a notorious Naxalite a militant leftist revolutionary he is now a withered shell; a man broken by police torture, racked with fevers and sores. The only way he can endure his life is by shutting out the past. But when Ruhiton is moved to a better jail and eventually freed, memories return to haunt him. Ruhiton inevitably looks back upon his youth, his marriage, his home in the Himalayan foothills and he remembers, too, the friends he has killed, the revolutionary colleagues he worked with, and the ideals he once believed in. Dark, powerful, and full of ambiguities, the classic novel Fever, originally written in Bengali in 1977, questions the human cost of revolution and its inevitable transience. A sensation in its time, it remains one of the greatest novels about the Naxalite movement. Fever is an intense look at the universality of militancy, violence, and civil war, and the power of revolutionary ideals to seduce young minds.

The short story tells the many stories of Bengali literature like no other form can. Arriving in Bengal in the wake of British colonisers, Bengali writers quickly made the prose short story their own, and by the twentieth century, a profusion of literary magazines and journals meant that short stories were being avidly read by millions. Writers responded to this hunger for words with a ferocious energy which reflected the turmoil of their times: their stories covered land wars, famine, the caste system, religious conflict, patriarchy, Partition and the liberation war that saw the emergence of the independent country of Bangladesh. Across these shifting geographical borders, writers also looked inward, evolving new literary styles and stretching the possibilities of social realism, political fiction, and intimate domestic tales. A first in English, this anthology gathers together a century's worth of extraordinary stories. From a woman who eats fish in secret to the woes of an ageing local footballer, the anxieties of a middle-class union rep to a lawyer who stumbles upon a philosopher's stone, this is a collection that celebrates making art of life, in all its difficulty and joy.

In the early 1960s, the Hungry Generation revitalized Bengali poetry in Calcutta, liberating it from the fetters of scholarship and the fog of punditry and freeing it to explore new forms, language, and subjects. Shakti Chattopadhyay was a cofounder of the movement, and his poems remain vibrant and surprising more than a half century later. In his "urban pastoral" lines, we encounter street colloquialisms alongside high diction, a combination that at the time was unprecedented. Loneliness, anxiety, and dislocation trouble this verse, but they are balanced by a compelling belief in the redemptive power of beauty. This book presents more than one hundred of Chattopadhyay's poems, introducing an international audience to one of the most prominent and important Bengali poets of the twentieth century.

Bhaskar Chakrabarti's poetry is synonymous with the romantic melancholia inherent to Calcutta. His trenchant poetic voice was one of the most significant to emerge in the 1960s and '70s perhaps the most prolific period of modern Bengali poetry. Spanning the rise of militant leftism, the spread of crippling poverty across India, the war in Bangladesh, the influx of millions of refugees, the dark, dictatorial days of Indira Gandhi's reign, and the disillusionment of communist rule in Bengal, Chakrabarti's poems plumb the depths of urban angst, expressing the spirit of sadness and alienation in delicate metaphors wrapped in deceptively lucid language. In this first-ever comprehensive translation of Chakrabarti's work, award-winning translator Arunava Sinha masterfully articulates that clarity of vision, retaining the unique cadence and idioms of the Bengali language. Presenting verses and prose poems from all of Chakrabarti's life from his first volume, When Will Winter Come, published in 1971, to his last, The Language of Giraffes, published just before his death in 2005, and collecting several unpublished works as well Things That Happen and Other Poems introduces the world to a brilliant and universal poetic voice of urban life.

The seventh-most spoken language in the world, Bengali is home to some of the most distinctive poetry ever written anywhere. Starting with the later poems of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, there has been a long and continuous line of modern poetry in the language, its span ranging from lyrical love poems to passionate political verse, from expressions of existential anguish to psychological explorations. This volume celebrates over one hundred years of this poetry from the two Bengals-the eastern Indian state and the country of Bangladesh- represented by over fifty different poets and a multitude of forms and styles.

A tense sociopolitical novel exploring power, violence, and morality in 1970s India.   The Murderer’s Mother takes readers to the late 1970s in the Indian state of West Bengal, where the Communist Party–led Left Front has just been voted into power.  It tells the story of Tapan, who has been installed as a gang leader by the most powerful man in the locality in order to kill “unwanted obstacles,� which he does, one after another. Tapan knows there is no other way he can earn a living, but at the same time, he is desperate to protect his family. He tries to stop petty crime and assaults on women, even as he protects his patron’s interests. Through the dissonance, he becomes both a feared and revered figure, but his patron’s game becomes clear: now the murderer, too, must be eliminated.

A touching story of war, family, innocence, and memory from one of the top Bengali writers of all time. For the first time translated into English. Bangladesh, 1971: the war of independence from Pakistan has torn through peaceful villages and turned life upside down. In the midst of war, one young girl holds on as she discovers the world's unpredictability. During her father's prolonged absence, she reminisces about the essence of her abbu, an esteemed professor, loving community leader, and now unexpected warrior. She is moved by his quiet determination to preserve Bengali language and culture in a struggle for autonomy. In his diaries, her abbu describes the painful decisions he must make because of the threat of war, from embracing the brutality of taking up arms to the struggle of moving his family from the embattled city of Dhaka. Amid the tragedy is the unbroken bond between a father and daughter, which makes this powerful and historically faithful portrait of a family surviving the worst in the fight for independence all the more stirring.

Set in Calcutta in the 1970s, There Was No One at the Bus Stop is a powerful exploration of adultery and its overwhelming consequences. Trina, a married woman, impulsively decides one day to stop living a lie and walks out on her husband, daughter and son, in whose lives she no longer plays a role. But will she be able to sever the bonds and join the man she loves in his home? The man, Debashish, is haunted by his wife's recent suicide and is tormented by the possibility that his young son would rather live away from him. Through spare prose and searing dialogue, this novel unfolds over twelve hours on a single day. It reveals the often complex reasons that hold human relationships together and the motives that break them apart.

Dhaka may be one of the most densely populated cities in the world - noisy, grid-locked, short on public amenities, and blighted with sprawling slums - but, as these stories show, it is also one of the most colourful and chaotically joyful places you could possibly call home. Slum kids and film stars, day-dreaming rich boys, gangsters and former freedom fighters all rub shoulders in these streets, often with Dhaka's famous rickshaws ferrying them to and fro across cultural, economic and ethnic divides. Just like Dhaka itself, these stories thrive on the rich interplay between folk culture and high art; they both cherish and lampoon the city's great tradition of political protest, and they pay tribute to a nation that was borne out of a love of language, one language in particular, Bangla (from which all these stories have been translated).