Sumana Roy

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Sumana Roy is an Indian writer, poet, and essayist from Siliguri, West Bengal. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. She studied at Siliguri College and the University of North Bengal after attending Mahbert High School and Pratt Memorial School.

Her books include How I Became a Tree (2017), a non-fiction work about plants; Missing: A Novel (2019), a modern retelling of the Ramayana inspired by a real 2012 incident in Guwahati; Out of Syllabus (2019), a poetry collection organized like a school syllabus; and My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories (2019). She also edited Animalia Indica: The Finest Animal Stories in Indian Literature (2019). Her unpublished novel Love in the Chicken’s Neck was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2008, and How I Became a Tree was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt Prize in 2017 (and Sahitya Akademi Award nominations in 2019 and 2020).

Roy has held fellowships at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and at Cornell University, and she has worked with the Plant Humanities Lab at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard. She writes a monthly Treelogy column about plants for The Hindu Business Line, and her poems and essays have appeared in magazines such as Granta, The Caravan, Guernica, Himal Southasian, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.