Dr. Fakrul Alam
Fakrul Alam is an academic, a literary critic, essayist and editor as well as a translator from Bengali. He is Supernumerary Professor of English at the University of Dhaka. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Clemson University, USA, and has also been Visiting Professor at India’s Jadavpur University and at Visva-Bharati. He was a member of the jury of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for 2003 (Eurasia region), an adjudicator for the DSC South Asian Prize for Literature in 2011, and a member of the Prothom Alo Sahitya Puroshkar for 2014. . He received the SAARC Literature Award 2012 given at the SAARC Literature Festival of 2012 held at Lucknow India on 18 March 2012. He was awarded the Bangla Academy Puroshkar (Literature Award) in the Translation category for 2013 on February 24, 2013. Among his forthcoming works are Gitanjali: New Translations of the Nobel-Prize Winning Poems (Dhaka: UPL) and An Ocean of Sorrow, a translation of the nineteenth century Bengali epic narrative, Bishad Sindhu by Mir Masharraf Hussain and English, the Language of Power and the Power of Language and other Essays, a collection of essays, some published before, and others newly written for the volume. His publications include Imperial Entanglements and Literature in English (writer’s ink: Dhaka, 2007); South Asian Writers in English (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2006); Jibanananda Das: Selected Poems (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1999); Bharati Mukherjee (Boston: Twayne’s Contemporary United States Authors, 1996); and Daniel Defoe: Colonial Propagandist (University of Dhaka Publications, 1989). Among his more recent works is The Essential Tagore (Boston: .Harvard UP and Viswa Bharati: Kolkata, 2011; co-authored with Radha Chakravarty). His translation of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Unfinished Memoirs was published in 2012 by University Press in Bangladesh, Penguin Books in India, and Oxford University Press in Pakistan, and his Rabindranath Tagore and National Identity Formation in Bangladesh: Essays and Reviews was published in Dhaka by Bangla Academy in 2013.