Ketaki Kushari Dyson (1940-2026)
We were saddened by the news of the death yesterday of the Bengali writer and translator Ketaki Kushari Dyson at her home in Kidlington, Oxford. She was 86, and had been suffering from age-related illnesses for some time.
Her translation I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems by Rabindranath Tagore was published by Bloodaxe Books in 1991, with a second expanded edition following in 2010, and was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, translator, scholar, and critic, and well-known for her skill in mixing 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.
’Ketaki was a formidable person to meet or work with, an exacting “old school” academic who continued to work on her Tagore translation long after its publication, ensuring that any word or phrase which needed to be re-written or reconsidered in the light of later scholarship would be re-assessed and revised when the book went into a second, expanded edition,’ said editor Neil Astley. ‘I first came across her work in the early days of Bloodaxe. I was then also producing and printing books in Newcastle for Anne Stevenson’s two Oxford-based imprints, Old Fire Station Poets and Mid-Day Publications, one of their titles being Ketaki’s first collection of poems in English, Hibiscus in the north, in 1979. I well remember Anne introducing me to Ketaki in Oxford around that time, which led to Bloodaxe later publishing her Tagore edition, the most authoritative translation of his work anyone has published, the only one produced by a bilingual Bengali-English scholar-poet with the blessing of the guardians of Tagore’s legacy at Visva-Bharati University.’
Born in Calcutta in 1940, Ketaki 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. Her novel Notan Notan Payra Guli (1981-82) chronicled the life and struggles of immigrants in Britain. She wrote in both Bengali and English, belonging to that small minority of poets writing poetry in two languages. 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 novel Notan Notan Payra Guli (1981-82) chronicled the life and struggles of immigrants in Britain.
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).
She is survived by her husband Robert Dyson and sons Virgil Pujari Dyson and Igor Niladri Dyson.
[12 September 2026]
