Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor, and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.
Spivak, well known for her translation of Derrida as also some works of Mahasweta Devi, was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Prize for Translation in 1997
I am deeply honoured that the Sahitya Akademi have decided to acknowledge my efforts to translate the fiction of Mahasweta Devi.
I want to begin by thanking Mahasweta Devi for writing such spectacular prose. I want to thank my parents, Pares Chandra Chakravorty and Sivani Chakravorty for bringing me up in a household that was acutely conscious of the riches of Bangla. My father was a doctor. But we children were always reminded that my father’s Bangla essay for his matriculation examination had been praised by Tagore himself.