Sunanda Sikdar (born 1951) is an Indian writer and memoirist of

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 ...

origin. She was born after the

partition of India The Partition of British India in 1947 was the Partition (politics), change of political borders and the division of other assets that accompanied the dissolution of the British Raj in South Asia and the creation of two independent dominions: ...

in 1947, in the village of Digpait in

East Pakistan East Pakistan was a Pakistani province established in 1955 by the One Unit Scheme, One Unit Policy, renaming the province as such from East Bengal, which, in modern times, is split between India and Bangladesh. Its land borders were with India ...

, (now Bangladesh) from where her family migrated to Kolkata in India in the 1950s. Her award-winning memoir ''Doyamoyeer Kotha'' was published in 2008, and received enormous critical and popular acclaim. The essayist Prasanta Chakravarty wrote: :''"In Bangla literature, the greatest success story in recent times has been a post-partition memoir: ''Dayamayeer Katha'' (''Dayamayee’s Tale''), Sunanda Sikdar’s maiden work. Upon its arrival in January 2008, it received both critical and popular acclaim and in no time traversed the distance from being a cult hit to becoming an instant classic."'' The book received the

Ananda Puroshkar The Ananda Puraskar () is an award for Bengali literature awarded annually by the ABP Group to writers using Bengali, usually from West Bengal, India. History The award can be traced to a comment by Annada Shankar Ray ruing the absence of litera ...

and Penguin India has released an English translation under the title ''A Life Long Ago''. In 2010, an extract was also published as a part of Penguin's annual anthology, ''First Proof: The Penguin Book Of New Writing From India 6''.

References

Writers from Kolkata Bengali writers Bengali-language writers Women writers from West Bengal Living people Indian memoirists Indian women memoirists 1951 births Bangladeshi women writers {{India-writer-stub