Write Assamese

This project is a collaboration between Untold in the UK and BEE Books in Kolkata, to promote Indian literature in translation. The project focuses on new unpublished Assamese writers.

The translation ecosystem in India suffers from a lack of training opportunities. At the same time, aspiring fiction writers are often marginalised due to circumstance, language, and lack of opportunities to develop their work. This project carves out a space for consistent, quality translations emerging from Assam to generate new fiction for international audiences.

The stories from the project are published in A Fistful of Moonlight: Stories from Assam (Bee Books, India, January 2023). The anthology will be published by MacLehose Press/Hachette UK in October 2023, and you can now pre-order it.

New fiction from Assam

An anthology of contemporary short stories translated in English, edited by Mitra Phukan, Arunava Sinha and Lucy Hannah. Available in India in Assamese, and will be available in the UK in October 2023.

A Fistful of Moonlight is a collection of fourteen stories that explore love, identity, politics, fantasy and a fresh take on an age-old fairy tale, transporting readers into the heart of contemporary writing from Assam.

Project Team - Write Assamese

Lucy Hannah – Project Director

Lucy specialises in setting up and delivering creative initiatives with marginalised communities. She founded and led Commonwealth Writers which operates across 53 countries, particularly in areas with little or no creative industries. While at the BBC, she established BBC Writer’s Room which discovers, develops and champions new writing talent across the UK. She has worked with writers in areas of conflict and post-conflict, including: Afghanistan, Chechnya, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Sudan and N.E. Nigeria. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College, London, and Director of the BOCAS LitFest in Trinidad.

Esha Chatterjee – CEO of Bee Books

Esha runs the publishing house BEE Books and loves the art of making beautiful books. BEE Books publishes everything from translations, fiction, non-fiction, essays to graphic novels and corporate coffee table books. She also is the Managing Director for Patra Bharati and heads the marketing wing for the Bengali publishing press. She actively participates in structuring the events and looks after national and international collaborations, participates in various book fairs. She is also a book reviewer, critic, and moderator for literary events.

Mitra Phukan – Editor

Mitra Phukan is a writer, translator, columnist and trained classical vocalist who lives in Guwahati, Assam. Her published works include four children’s books, a biography, two novels—The Collector’s Wife and A Monsoon of Music—and a collection comprising fifty of her newspaper columns, titled Guwahati Gaze. In addition, her short stories have appeared in various journals. Her works have been translated into several Indian and European languages. As a translator herself, she has brought the works of some of the best-known contemporary Assamese fiction writers into English. Her widely read column, ‘All Things Considered’, appears fortnightly in The Assam Tribune.

Arunava Sinha – Editor

Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and nonfiction into English. He is twice the winner of the Crossword translation award, for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), respectively, and the winner of the Muse India translation award (2013) for Buddhadeva Bose’s When The Time Is Right. Besides India, his translations have been published in the UK and the US in English, and in several European and Asian countries through further translation. He is an associate professor of practice in the Creative Writing department at Ashoka University, and Co-Director, Ashoka Centre of Translation.