Arunava Sinha graced the 33rd session of An Author’s Afternoon on 21st July, 2016, at Taj Bengal, Kolkata. Debutante writer Priyanka Mookerjee moderated the event. The session was presented by Shree Cement in association with Prabha Khaitan Foundation, t2, Siyahi and Taj Bengal. The fun-filled session drew fans of the translator from all over the city.

Arunava Sinha translates modern, classic and contemporary Bengali fiction and nonfiction into English. Over thirty of his translations have been published so far. He won the Crossword Translation Award, for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), respectively, and the winner of the Muse India Translation Award (2013) for Buddhadeva Bose’s When The Time Is Right. He has also been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (2009) for his translation of Chowringhee.

When he was asked why he got into translation, I wanted to steal other people’s ideas and pass them off as his own, he joked. According to him translation is a drug that cannot be explained to people who don’t use the drug. On the declining popularity of short stories, he felt that “publishers have the idea that is not going to sell. Publishers feel a short story collection needs the reader to invest 20 times more for each story.”