Sumana Sinha

Shumona Sinha, other spelling Sumana Sinha; (Bengali: সুমনা সিনহা, Calcutta, June 27, 1973) is a French writer from West Bengal, India, who lives in Paris. Her harsh, but multilayered poetical literary reckoning with France's asylum system, made her famous overnight.

In her interviews for the French media, Shumona Sinha claims that her homeland is no longer India, nor even France, but the French language.

In 1990, she received Bengali’s Best Young Poet Award, and moved to Paris in 2001. She has a Master's degree in French language and literature from the Sorbonne University. In 2008 she published her first novel Fenêtre sur l'abîme. She has translated and published several anthologies of Bengali and French poetry together with her ex-husband, the writer Lionel Ray.

In 2011, her second novel, Assommons les pauvres !, was published at Éditions de l'Olivier and was acclaimed by the critics. She got the Prix Valery-Larbaud 2012, the Prix Populiste in 2011, Internationaler Literaturpreis HKW (2016), was in the short list of the Prix Renaudot, had its title inspired by the eponymous poem in prose of Charles Baudelaire Assommons les Pauvres !. The central character/narrator of this novel, with a strong resemblance to Sinha herself, was brutally confronted by the misery, both material and intellectual, of her fellow people, migrating in Europe for a better life.

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