Ketaki Kushari Dyson

KKD (poet, novelist, playwright, translator, scholar, and critic of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) grew up and was educated in Calcutta, but has lived in or near Oxford for most of her adult life. She writes bilingually and biculturally, in both Bengali and English, with frequent attention to issues of cultural assimilation, of gender, and of relationships among women. She has published extensively in a wide range of genres: at least ten volumes of poetry (six in Bengali, four in English), six translations (mostly of poetry), three collections of essays, a volume of autobiographical sketches, two Bengali novels, scholarly studies of early British colonists in India and of writer Victoria Ocampo , and three Bengali plays (one of them translated into English). KKD has co-edited a volume of essays on bilingual women writers, and published articles, essays, and book reviews in Bengali journals.

Milestones

26 June 1940
Ketaki Kushari (later KKD ) was born in Calcutta.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Dyson, Ketaki Kushari. Emails about Ketaki Dyson to Rebecca Blasco.
1978
Oxford University Press published KKD 's doctoral thesis, revised as A Various Universe: A Study of the Journals and Memoirs of British Men and Women in the Indian Subcontinent, 1765-1856.
Dyson, Ketaki Kushari. A Various Universe. Oxford University Press, 2002, p. xxi; 406 pp.
title-page, vii

Biography

KKD 's given name, the name of a flower, was taken from the poetry of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore , who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.
Dyson, Ketaki Kushari. “Forging a Bilingual Identity: A Writer’s Testimony”. Bilingual Women: Anthropological Approaches to Second Language Use, edited by Pauline Burton, Ketaki Kushari Dyson, and Shirley Ardener, Berg, 1994, pp. 170-85.
172

Birth and Family