Birth— 1962
Where—West Bengal, India
Education—
Currently—Kolkata

Bibliography

Novels

Other Books

Born in 1962, Rabisankar Bal is a bengali novelist and short story writer, credited with over 15 novels and five volumes of short stories, and a collection each of poetry and literary essays. He has been writing for over thirty years. Apart from being a writer, he pursues journalism. He zealously follows literature, painting, and also world cinema.

His novel The Biography of Midnight won the West Bengal’s Government’s Sutapa Roychowdhury Memorial Prize. Dozakhnama, acknowledged by the late doyen of Bengali literature Sunil Gangopadhyay as the finest novelist of 2010, won the West Bengal Government’s Bakimchandra Smriti Puraskar. A journalist by profession, Bal lives in Kolkata and passionately follows literature, music, painting and world cinema. His new novel “Aynajiban” (Life, a mirror) is based on the life of the Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi, and told through the imagined eyes of Ibn Batuta.

Rabisankar Bal’s novel ‘Dozakhnama: Conversations in Hell’ re-imagines the ‘dozakh’ (hell) not as a prison cell everyone dreads to live in but a liberating space that allows an undeterred flow of free thoughts sans fear of censorship or condemnation.

Dozakhnama: Conversation in Hell (2012)
Rabisankar Bal
When two literary giants- Mirza Ghalib, the quintessential classical Urdu and Persian poet of the Mughal era and Saadat Hasan Manto, a controversial short story writer of the 20th Century start a conversation, what follows is an unfolding of a history of a country that has withstood all seasons of change, years of colonial rule, partition and war, several months of captivity and countless days of poverty.

A Mirrored Life (2015)
Rabisankar Bal
Bengali author Rabisankar Bal’s novel A Mirrored Life: The Rumi Novel, recently translated by the talented Arunava Sinha, tells you pretty early on to not pay too much attention to trifling things like memory, the truth behind stories, or even a writer’s fidelity.