Rajshekhar Basu was a Bengali chemist, author and lexicographer. He was chiefly known for his comic and satirical short stories, and is considered the greatest Bengali humorist of the 20th century. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1956.
Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay is a Bengali author from India. He has written stories for both adults and children. He is known for creating the relatively new fictional sleuths Barodacharan and Shabor Dasgupta.
Mani Sankar Mukherjee is an Indian writer in the Bengali language, who also served as the Sheriff of Kolkata. He grew up in Hindmotor of West Bengal.
Sukumar Sen was an Indian linguist and historian of the Bengali literature, who was also well versed in Pāli, Prakrit and Sanskrit.
The Pashchimbanga Bangla Akademi is the official regulatory body of the Bengali language in India. It was founded on 20 May 1986 in Kolkata to act as the official authority of the language and is entrusted with the responsibility of reforming Bengali spelling and grammar, compiling dictionaries, encyclopedias and terminologies and promoting Bengali language and culture in West Bengal. They are widely accepted by the Governments of West Bengal and Tripura as well as a considerable number of private publishing houses and institutions such as the Oxford University Press and the Ramakrishna Mission.
Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay was an Indian novelist who wrote in the Bengali language. He wrote 65 novels, 53-story-books, 12 plays, 4 essay-books, 4 autobiographies, 2 travel stories and composed several songs. He was awarded Rabindra Puraskar, Sahitya Akademi Award, Jnanpith Award, Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan. He was nominated for Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 and posthumously nominated in 1972.
Bengali literature denotes the body of writings in the Bengali language and which covers Old Bengali, Middle Bengali and Modern Bengali with the changes through the passage of time and dynastic patronization or non-patronization. Bengali has developed over the course of roughly 1,400 years. If the emergence of the Bengali literature supposes to date back to roughly 650 AD, the development of Bengali literature claims to be 1600 years old. The earliest extant work in Bengali literature is the Charyapada, a collection of Buddhist mystic songs in Old Bengali dating back to the 10th and 11th centuries. The timeline of Bengali literature is divided into three periods: ancient (650–1200), medieval (1200–1800) and modern. Medieval Bengali literature consists of various poetic genres, including Hindu religious scriptures, Islamic epics, Vaishnava texts, translations of Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit texts, and secular texts by Muslim poets. Novels were introduced in the mid-19th century. Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore is the best known figure of Bengali literature to the world. Kazi Nazrul Islam, notable for his activism and anti-British literature, was described as the Rebel Poet and is now recognised as the National poet of Bangladesh.
Annada Shankar Ray was an Indian poet and essayist in Bengali. He also wrote some Odia poetry.
Rai Bahadur Dinesh Chandra Sen was a Bengali writer, educationist and researcher of Bengali folklore from the Indian subcontinent. He was the founding faculty member and the Ramtanu Lahiri Research Fellow of the Department of Bengali Language and Literature of the University of Calcutta. He died in Calcutta in 1939.
Pramathanath Chaudhuri, known as Pramatha Chaudhuri, aliasBirbal, was a Bengali writer and a figure in Bengali literature. He was the nephew of Rabindranath Tagore as his mother was Sukumari Debi, the second sister of Tagore. He married musician and writer Indira Devi Chaudhurani, daughter of Satyendranath Tagore, the first Indian to have joined the Indian Civil Services and an author, composer and feminist, who was the second eldest brother of Rabindranath Tagore.
Rebati Mohan Dutta Choudhury was a noted Assamese litterateur, Sahitya Akademi Award winner and an academic from Gauripur in Assam, India. Popularly he is known as Sheelabhadra, his pen name.
Syed Kawsar Jamal is an Indian poet, essayist and academic. He was born in the village of Murshidabad, West Bengal, India on 24 October 1950.
Mahananda Poudyal was an Indian writer, teacher, social worker and political thinker.
Khaled Choudhury was a theatre personality and artist of Bengal. He worked for various directors of both Bengali and Hindi plays, including Sombhu Mitra, Tripti Mitra, and Shyamanand Jalan in various capacities — creating the Stage, sets and costumes and later as music director. He was a bachelor. He has been awarded the Padma Bhushan for his contribution to theatre in India's Republic Day Honours List on 26 January 2012. He died on 30 April 2014 in Kolkata.
Alokeranjan Dasgupta was a Bengali poet who was the author of over 20 books of poetry. He translated Bengali and Santal poetry and plays into English and German, and also translated literature from German and French into Bengali. He also published a number of books of essays, and was well known for his distinctive prose style.
Bankim Puraskar is the highest award given by the Government of West Bengal for contribution to Bengali fiction. The award was instituted in 1975 in memory of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, a famous Bengali novelist of the 19th century. It has been brought under the aegis of Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, functioning under the Department of Information & Cultural Affairs, in 2003. The award is handed over by the Chief Minister of West Bengal.
Santanu Kumar Acharya is a National Sahitya Academy Award-winning Indian writer.
Anita Agnihotri is an Indian Bengali writer and poet. Her works have been translated into several major Indian and foreign languages, including English, Swedish and German. She is also a retired civil servant.
Paramita Satpathy is an Indian writer. Paramita is the daughter of Sahitya Akademi Award winner poet Pratibha Satpathy and Nityananda Satpathy.
