Sampurna Chattarji is a poet, fiction writer and translator, with seven books to her credit, including her poetry collection, Sight May Strike You Blind, published by the Sahitya Akademi; her translation of Sukumar Ray's poetry and prose Abol Tabol: The Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray, published by Penguin. Her first novel Rupture was published by HarperCollins in 2009.

Devi

Poems that inhabit the persona of the Goddess Durga, and speak in a voice that is questioning, irreverent, sensual, strong, grieving. This Durga rants, sings, laughs as she examines her own mythologies and the symbols that surround her. Is she goddess or human, is she ancient or very, very modern? Does she speak to herself, or to a woman who mirrors her? These poems spring from the space between divinity and humanity, the sacred and the profane, opposing binaries and seeking instead a vivid, visceral, personal experience of desire, destruction, and the "terrible and essential" truths of Her song.

Category: Poetry
Rights: Available

Eating the Breeze

At the heart of a story of three generations-seen through the eyes of friends, neighbours, siblings, cousins and children-are Rudra and Reema Banerji, a retired couple living with their working daughter in a new housing complex in Kolkata. As they unravel a complex web of memory that traverses time and location-from Ranchi in India and Chattogram in Bangladesh to the Maharajah's white tigers in Rewa and the wonder years of an international fraternity in Ethiopia, what emerges is a meditation on the vicissitudes of illness, death and separation, the centrality of family and the fractured idea of 'home'.

Category: Short stories
Rights: Available

The Land of the Well (forthcoming)

It is Goa in the monsoons. A shy and lonely teenage boy finds himself drawn towards a circle of young men and women holidaying at the same hotel. In their midst is Momo, the girl he will do anything to be close to. As if sensing his need, they adopt him, and at the end of a long and intense day of ragging, they tell him about the strange circumstances of their friendship. Bonded by illness, ruled by a small, absurdly well-read man with baby cheeks, the group dubs him 'the innocent' and challenges him to provide an answer to the riddle of their condition. The boy, discovering in himself a hitherto untapped gift for fiction, tells them the story of the Land of the Well. Expecting praise, and further acceptance, he is horrified when the outcome is an alienation more complete than he has ever faced before.

A novel that examines this age of anxiety, wherein the bodies of the young and successful erupt in ways that mirror their innermost traumas, The Land of the Well walks the treacherous line between fact and fantasy, between erasure and compulsive recording.

Category: Fiction
Publishing House: HarperCollins Publishers India

Dirty Love and Other Stories (forthcoming)

Home to ten million migrants and more. As pitiless as it can be warm. This is Mumbai. Or is it? Here, an Insect boy sells stories about sea-crossings, a street magician stands for elections and Makhdoom Baba resurrects a goat. While Augustus Andrade seeks Bliss in Mahim Church, and Robbie Lee burns paper money in the last Chinese temple in Mazgaon, dream shuttles speed through the rain, and men fall prey to dirty love.
This is the great Schizopolis, sung by its only true dweller-the one from faraway.

Category: Short stories
Publishing House: Penguin Books India

Rupture

In the course of twenty-four hours, nine characters across five Indian cities are faced with a brutal need to examine their own past. These eight are bound by more than fear and violence. Between each character and his or her life is the rupture of reimagining.

Category: Fiction
Publishing House: HarperCollins Publishers India