Kajal Bandyopadhyay
Kajal Bandyopadhyay, Professor of English, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, is at the same time a poet and prose-writer. He has a number of works of editing and translation also to his credit. He was born in Barisal, Banglaesh, in 1954. Ideas, ideology, activism and profession of his father, who had been a left activist and a Headmaster, can be said to have devolved on him. Kajal Bandyopadhyay wrote his doctorate on the plays of Wole Soyinka, the first black writer to get Nobel Prize for literature. He did this at the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Africa is sort of his mother-continent and African literature in English is one of the prime areas of his interest. Another such area consists of plays by Henrik Ibsen. Some books of his essays on African literature in English and Ibsen’s plays are going to be published soon. Seven books of his Bangla poems have so far been published.
Among Bengali writers, Rabindranath Tagore, Nazrul Islam and Jeebananda Das come first to impress him most.
Among Swedish writers, Kajal Bandyopadhyay knows about August Strindberg and Astrid Lindgren.