Rohini Chowdhury is an established literary translator and the author of several children’s books. Her published writing is in Hindi and English and covers a wide spectrum of literary genres including translations, novels, short fiction, comics, and non-fiction. Her literary interests include Indian literature, mythology, folklore, mathematics and history. She is published by Penguin Random House India, Scholastic India, and Rupa Publications.
Rohini’s primary languages as a literary translator are pre-modern and modern Hindi, and English. Her translations include the seventeenth-century Braj Bhasha text Ardhakathanak, widely regarded as the first autobiography in an Indian language, as well as Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, the sixteenth-century retelling of the story of Ram unanimously regarded as the greatest achievement of Hindi literature.
In addition to her work as a writer and literary translator, Rohini is also interested in the preservation of folk literature and traditional stories. In 2002, she started the story website longlongtimeago.com, with the objective of collecting and making available in one place as many stories as possible.
Rohini writes Eaten by a Fish, a research-based newsletter on Indian literature. She also writes The Story Birds together with writer and illustrator Shaiontoni Bose.
Rohini is committed to the promotion of literacy amongst children. She used her extensive experience in the field to run online creative writing classes for children during the coronavirus-related school closures in the UK. She has also participated in Microsoft’s ‘Skype in the Classroom’ online education initiative, conducting creative writing classes in more than twenty schools across the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle-east.
Born and educated in Kolkata, India, Rohini now lives and writes in London, UK. She is widely travelled and brings in the nuances of the cultures of Asia, Africa and the West in her writings.
Notables
Rohini’s first short story, Kosi, published in the Penguin India anthology The Weretiger, was runner-up in the New Writer Prose and Poetry Competition, UK, 2001.
Rohini scripted a short, bilingual Bengali-English animation film, Granny’s Monster Machines, with co-writer Rezaul Kabir. The film was created as part of Pop Up Fusion, an animation project launched by Pop Up Festival of Stories to encourage bilingualism in school children in London. The film was runner up as the Best Youth Film in the Lab Film Festival, London, 2013.
Rohini’s biography of Dr. Verghese Kurien (Verghese Kurien: The Milkman of India; Scholastic) was shortlisted in the Best Book: Non-Fiction category of The Hindu-Young World-Goodbooks Awards for children’s books from India in 2016.
Her translation of the Sanskrit classic, Panchatantra, was amongst the Amazon Editor’s Picks for Children for summer, 2017.
She co-edited the short story collection, Behind the Shadows (Amazon Kindle, October 2012), with South African writer, Zukiswa Wanner. Zukiswa and Rohini read through almost two hundred short stories submitted by writers across Asia and Africa to select the 21 stories that make up the anthology. The collection includes Penguin-shortlisted author Isabella Morris, Caine Prize-shortlisted writer Lauri Kubuitsile, and Singaporean Young Artist Award recipient author and poet, Felix Cheong.
Rohini’s first book, The Three Princes of Persia, published by Puffin India in 2005, was translated into Tamil by Sasikala Babu under the title Persiavin Moonru Ilavarasargal: Ulaga Ithigasangalil Kuzhanthaigal (published January 2018, by Tamil publishers Ethir Veliyedu).