Ketaki Kushari Dyson (1940-2026) was born in Calcutta and studied English literature at Calcutta and Oxford, obtaining firsts from both universities. She also held a doctorate from Oxford. She settled in Britain after her marriage to an Englishman, but did not give up writing in her first language nor her links with the literary life of her native Bengal. She wrote in both Bengali and English, belonging to that small minority of poets writing poetry in two languages. Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, translator, scholar, and critic, and well-known for her skill in mixing the genres, she was the author of more than thirty titles in her two languages and was regarded as one of the outstanding Bengali writers of her generation. She received the Bhubanmohini Dasi Medal of the University of Calcutta for eminent contribution to contemporary Bengali letters (1986), the Ananda Award twice (in 1986 and 1997), and in 2009 the Star Ananda Award for being the Best Bengali of the Year in Literature. She led an interdisciplinary research project on the effects of Tagore’s protanopic colour vision on his writings and visual art, leading to a major scholarly publication (Dyson, Adhikary et al, Ronger Rabindranath, Ananda, Calcutta, 1997).
Her English publications included two acclaimed scholarly books, A Various Universe: A Study of the Journals and Memoirs of British Men and Women in the Indian Subcontinent, 1765-1856 (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1978, second edition 2002, Oxford India Paperbacks, 2006), and In Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo (Sahitya Akademi, Delhi, 1988, reprinted 1996). She was for a period a Research Associate at Oxford’s Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women, for which she co-edited Bilingual Women: Anthropological Approaches to Second-Language Use (Berg, Oxford/Providence, 1994). Her translation I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems by Rabindranath Tagore (Bloodaxe Books, 1991; second expanded edition, 2010) was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.
