Nilanjana S. Roy is an Indian journalist, literary critic and author.
Personal life
Roy was born in Kolkata. She was educated at La Martiniere, Kolkata, and graduated with a degree in literature from St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi, in the 1990s. Married to Devangshu Datta, contributing editor of Business Standard, and a consultant to financial dailies and business magazines, Roy lives in Delhi with her husband.
Career
Nilanjana Roy is the author of various books such as The Wildings, which won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award. It was also shortlisted for the Tata Literature First Book Award and the Commonwealth First Book Award, and longlisted for the DSC Prize. The Hundred Names of Darkness, part two of The Wildings, was published by Aleph in 2013. A collection of essays on books and reading, How To Read in Indian, is forthcoming from HarperCollins. Roy is also the editor of A Matter of Taste, an anthology of food writing. Her column on the reading life for the Business Standard has run for over 15 years; she has also written on gender for The New York Times and the Kolkata Telegraph, and has contributed to the BBC, Outlook, The New Republic, Huffington Post and several other publications. Over 15 years in media and publishing, Roy has been chief editor at Westland/ Tranquebar, edited and contributed to the Outlook Books page, Biblio and several other literary magazines/ periodicals and served on the jury for the Crossword Prize and the DSC Prize. She had a brief second life as "Hurree Babu", whom she borrowed from Kipling in order to start India's first literary blog–Kitabkhana, which the Babu ran for several years. She has worked extensively on free speech and censorship issues in India. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Caravan, Civil Lines 6, The Sunday Times, The Hindu and Biblio. Some of her stories for children have been published in Scholastic's Spooky Stories, Science Fiction Stories and BeWitched.
