V. Ramaswamy took up literary translation of voices from the margins after two decades of grassroots and public activism in support of the labouring poor in his city, Kolkata. He has translated Subimal Misra’s The Golden Gandhi Statue from America: Early Stories, Wild Animals Prohibited: Stories, Anti-Stories, and This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale: Two Anti-Novels, and Manoranjan Byapari’s novels, The Runaway Boy, and The Nemesis. His translation of Adhir Biswas’s Memories of Arrival: A Voice from the Margins, was published in 2022, as were Shahidul Zahir’s Life and Political Reality: Two Novellas (co-translated with Shahroza Nahrin), and Why There Are No Noyontara Flowers in Agargaon Colony: Stories. Ramaswamy’s translation of the novel,

I See The Face, also by Shahidul Zahir. was published in 2023. Ramaswamy has attended residencies at Sangam House, India, Writers Omi, USA, and Toji Cultural Foundation, Korea. He was selected for the Toji Fellowship in Wonju, Korea, in 2016, and the Literature Across Frontiers – Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship in creative writing & translation at Aberystwyth University, Wales, in 2016. Ramaswamy received the translation fellowship of the New India Foundation, and a sample translation grant from English PEN, in 2022.