Ashoka University

Sumana Roy is Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University. She is working on the Indian Plant
Humanities project with the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability, Ashoka University, and has
been a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich (2018), a Full-
Time Visiting Fellow at the South Asia Program, Cornell University (Fall 2018), and a Fellow at
Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University (Summer 2021).
Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree and Provincials: Postcards from the
Peripheries; Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal, a work of literary criticism; two works of
fiction, Missing: A Novel and My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories; and two poetry collections, Out of
Syllabus and V.I.P.: Very Important Plant. She has recently translated Jagadish Chandra Bose’s essays,
with an introduction, in The Man Who Made Plants Write. She has also been involved in founding and
editing literary and cultural magazines including The North-East Review and Antiserious, and co-edits On
Eating, a multilingual archive of writing on food and eating cultures in the Indian subcontinent. Her
poems, essays and stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Orion, Lit Hub, The Point, Granta,
Guernica, Prairie Schooner, LARB, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Minnesota Review,
Emergence Magazine, The Common, The White Review, Berfrois, The Journal of South Asian Studies,
and American Book Review, and in numerous other publications. Her essays and books have been
translated into French, German, Italian, Korean, Hindi and Bangla.
Her research and practice move between the creative and the critical, with an abiding attention to what is
ignored and unnoticed—the background, the edges, the unattended forms that often remain outside the
centre of literary and intellectual discourse. This impulse is visible in her work that moves between
literary studies, plant and elemental life, provincial cultures, poetics, and the relationship between art,
experience and emotion. Her engagement with the rasa tradition, in particular, grows from an interest in
the relationship between the elemental world and human feeling. Across these different fields, she is
interested in forms of attention that might make possible a richer understanding of lives, histories and
ways of thinking that have been overlooked or rendered peripheral.