Sunetra Gupta was born in Calcutta in 1965 and wrote her first works of fiction in Bengali. She graduated in 1987 from Princeton University and received her PhD from the University of London in 1992.
She is the author of 6 novels, several short stories and essays, and also an accomplished translator of the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. Her novels have been awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Southern Arts Literature Prize, shortlisted for the Crossword Award, and longlisted for the Orange Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
She lives in Oxford where she is Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford with an interest in malaria, HIV, influenza and bacterial diseases. She has been awarded the the Zoological Society of London Scientific Medal and the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award for her scientific research.
In memoriam
My beloved literary agent of 18 years, Esmond Harmsworth, passed away completely unexpectedly in his sleep on April 9, 2025.
It would be impossible to express how much I will miss him, first as a friend but also as a most discerning editor of my work.
I see him in my garden on a sunny April day like this in 2007, meeting for the first time, and realising very quickly that we could really make each other laugh over the most serious of matters; I see him leaning out of the window in the kitchen of his Boston flat as we talked late into the night; I remember his delight when I presented his labrador, Eloise, with a set of dog dominoes; we shared a love of food and surrealism and I remember the great pleasure he took in introducing me to such curiosities as the Boston Mapparium and then treating me to a dish of fiddlehead ferns; I want him to walk in through the door and say - surely you knew that this was all a joke, and what’s with all these semi-colons?
The last time I saw him was in early March over a very spicy Punjabi lunch and we agreed, as we parted, to go and see the Leigh Bowery exhibition at the Tate Modern after he returned from Easter holidays with his family. It was wonderful to see the happiness and fulfilment that Jerome and the children brought to him.
The generosity of his spirit and his eternally joyful and simultaneously critical gaze upon all aspects of life will persist within many of us forever.
Sunetra Gupta, April 2025