Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay (15 August 1931 – 21 December 2021) was an Indian

Bengali Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...

poet, translator and novelist.

Life and career

Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay was born in

Puri Puri () is a coastal city and a Nagar Palika, municipality in the state of Odisha in eastern India. It is the district headquarters of Puri district and is situated on the Bay of Bengal, south of the state capital of Bhubaneswar. It is als ...

, Bihar and Orissa Province (

British India The provinces of India, earlier presidencies of British India and still earlier, presidency towns, were the administrative divisions of British governance on the Indian subcontinent. Collectively, they have been called British India. In one ...

), on 15 August 1931. He graduated from the Calcutta University and became a Chartered Accountant from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (

ICAI The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) is India's largest professional accounting body under the administrative control of Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Government of India. It was established on 1 July 1949 as a statutory bod ...

). He continued with his professional studies and became a holder of the Company Secretary certificate from the Institute of Company Secretaries of India ( ICSI). He took a break from his working life and went on to study management from the British Institute of Management in

Glasgow Glasgow ( ; sco, Glesca or ; gd, Glaschu ) is the most populous city in Scotland and the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom, as well as being the 27th largest city by population in Europe. In 2020, it had an estimated popul ...

(United Kingdom). His first book of poetry, ''Sonar Harin'' (The Golden Deer) was published in 1957. He was one of the four post-Modernist legendary poets of Krittibas magazine of

Kolkata Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , the official name until 2001) is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary business, comme ...

. His first novel ''Sahabas'' was published in the Desh and at that time the novel created a lot of controversy among the readers about wife-swapping. He worked as a counsellor in the Creative Writing Programme of the Indira Gandhi National Open University. In 2008 Mukhopadhyay received the

Sahitya Akademi Award The Sahitya Akademi Award is a literary honour in India, which the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, annually confers on writers of the most outstanding books of literary merit published in any of the 22 languages of the ...

for his book ''Ghumer Borir Moto Chand''. An anthology of his poems was translated to English by Robert McNamara as The Cat Under the Stairs. He died of a cardiac arrest in the early hours of 21 December 2021, at the age of 90.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mukhopadhyay, Sarat Kumar 1931 births 2021 deaths Bengali Hindus 20th-century Bengalis 21st-century Bengalis Bengali writers Bengali poets Bengali male poets Bengali novelists Recipients of the Sahitya Akademi Award in Bengali University of Calcutta alumni 20th-century Indian writers 20th-century Indian male writers 20th-century Indian translators 20th-century Indian novelists 20th-century Indian poets 21st-century Indian writers 21st-century Indian male writers 21st-century Indian poets 21st-century Indian novelists 21st-century Indian translators Indian male poets Indian male writers Indian male novelists Indian poets Indian novelists Indian translators Poets from West Bengal People from Puri Writers from Kolkata