Nabarun Bhattacharya

Nabarun Bhattacharya was an Indian Bengali writer deeply committed to a revolutionary and radical aesthetics. He was born at Baharampur (Berhampur), West Bengal. He was the only child of actor Bijon Bhattacharya and writer Mahashweta Devi.

He is most known for his anarchic novel, Herbert (1993), which was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, and adapted into a film by the same name in 2005.

Nabarun is renowned as a fiction writer, and justifiably so. But he wrote poems as well and Ei Mrityu Upotyoka Aaamaar Desh Na (This Valley of Death Is Not My Country) is arguably his most acclaimed collection of poems.

Nabarun over the years consistently contributed to various little magazines, which together constitute a promising alternative mode of literary culture in Bengal that challenges the influence of big capital. It is equally noteworthy that his writing style deconstructs the gentle middle class ethos of the Bengali society. Most of his characters belong to the lower strata of existence. His fictions reinvigorate the received Bengali language with forceful idioms and expressions from the margins, which might often bombard the chaste taste of a Tagorean upper and middle class, still very much under the spell of a 19th century Victorian sensibility.

Books by Nabarun Bhattacharya