Rimi B. Chatterjee - Biography

Biography

Rimi B. Chatterjee was born of expatriate Bengali parents in Belfast, Ulster, then lived for a time in Dorset, UK. She has a younger brother. The family returned to India in 1979. She spent the next seven years in North Bengal where her father, an ENT surgeon, was attached to a clinic. She came to Calcutta in 1986 to continue her education, living with friends and in paying guest accommodation. She went to Modern High School, then Lady Brabourne College (1989–1991) an affiliate of the University of Calcutta to study English literature. Around this time she began writing in earnest, producing mainly poems, but also some short stories and plays.

She joined Jadavpur University for her MA degree in English (1991–1993). She worked for a few months for the Telegraph newspaper, Calcutta, before leaving for the University of Oxford to do doctoral research. She initially intended to do this on the piracy of P.B. Shelley's works by his contemporaries, but under the guidance of William St Clair, who was already working on this topic for the book that ultimately became The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, she moved instead in the direction of studying publishing history in India. Eventually she researched Oxford University Press and Macmillan trading to South Asia. The title of her thesis was 'A History of the Trade to South Asia of Macmillan and Company and Oxford University Press, 1875 -1900' but she gathered enough material to continue this history till 1947.

She got her D.Phil in 1997 and returned to India. She married in 1998 but the marriage ended in divorce in 2001. In 1998 she began working as an editor with Bhatkal and Sen, a small publishing house which produces scholarly titles in English and Bengali in the social sciences and in gender studies under the imprints 'Samya' and 'Stree'. There she oversaw authors like Kancha Ilaiah and Bani Basu. She contributed to the process of translating into English several important works by women such as Sulekha Sanyal's Nabankur (The Seedling), Manikuntala Sen's Shediner Kotha (In Search of Freedom) and Jyotirmoyee Devi's The Impermanence of Lies. She also published a translation of Titu Mir, a novella by Mahasweta Devi for Seagull Books, Kolkata, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Crossword Book Award for translation.

She began her career as an academic at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 2000. She began work on her first novel, tentatively titled 'Live Like a Flame', in 2001, but it failed to find a publisher until 2010 when it was published by HarperCollins India under the title Black Light. She then moved to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where she was a fellow from 2003 to 2004. Much of the writing of her history of Oxford University Press was done there. She also published a translation of Abanindranath Tagore's autobiography Apon Katha (as Apon Katha: My Story) in 2004. She wrote Signal Red while at the Centre, and the novel was published by Penguin India in February 2005. By then she had joined Jadavpur University as a lecturer in . She also began conducting creative writing workshops, mainly for prose fiction; the first was a two-day one at Jadavpur University in August 2005, conducted jointly with Amitav Ghosh. In September 2005, shortly after she had begun writing The City of Love, she was diagnosed with diffuse large B cell lymphoma and underwent chemotherapy and radiotherapy, ending in March 2006. During this period, while confined to the house on account of low immunity, she completed the first draft of The City of Love, which was published in November 2007. The cancer is currently in remission.

In 2006 she wrote a script for a graphic novel, entitled Kalpa, which she submitted to Virgin Comics, India, but it was rejected shortly before Virgin Comics wound up operations in India. In 2008 she came in contact with a group of artists in Calcutta and restarted work on Kalpa. Currently Kalpa is into its seventh rescript, but work is likely to begin again by mid-2011. She is at present also working on Project C, a graphic magazine she is planning with Avijit Chatterjee, who designed the cover of Black Light. She created a short comic entitled "Killer" which appeared in the second anthology of Comix.India, and another entitled "The Bookshop on the Hill" for the comics journal Drighangchoo. She is working on her next prose novel, a far-future science fiction work titled 'Antisense'. She lives in Kolkata.