Anjana Basu was born in Allahabad and began her schooling in London. At the age of six, she was among the winners of a UK-wide essay competition organized by Cadbury’s. Returning to India, she joined Loreto House, Calcutta, and by twelve had one of her first stories serialized by The Times of India. A few years later, Kamala Das, then poetry editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, selected one of her poems for publication.
To date, Basu has published eleven novels, one work of translation, and three books of poetry. Her collections include The Chess Players and Other Poems (Writers Workshop), Picture Poems (Authorpress), and Word Seasons (Authorpress). Her poems have also featured in a Penguin India anthology and internationally in journals such as Kunapipi, The Blue Moon Review, The Phoenix Review, The Ginosko Review, The Salzburg Review, Prosopisia, and Indian Literature, among others.
Her story ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ was broadcast by the BBC. Her first collection of magical realism, The Agency Raga, was published in 1994 by Orient Longman, followed by the novel Curses in Ivory (HarperCollins, 2003). In 2004, she received the prestigious Hawthornden Fellowship in Scotland, where she began work on her second novel, Black Tongue (Roli Books, 2007). Conspiracy of Aunts, the sequel to Curses in Ivory, was published by Readomania in 2019.
Basu’s foray into children’s literature began in 2010 with Chinku and the Wolfboy (Roli). This was followed by Rhythms of Darkness (Gyaana, 2011) and her acclaimed Jim Corbett series on big-cat conservation for TERI. The series includes In the Shadow of the Leaves (2013), The Leopard in the Laboratory (2016), Eighteen Tides and a Tiger (2017), Hide and Seek Tiger (2019), and Lockdown Tiger (2021). Talking Cub published Grandfather’s Tiger Tales in 2022, and Did Someone Say Woof appeared from Niyogi Books in 2024.
Her bylines have appeared in Outlook, Outlook Traveller, Vogue, Condé Nast India, Cosmopolitan, and several leading newspapers as well as a wide range of literary journals. She collaborated with filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh on the dialogues for The Last Lear, starring Amitabh Bachchan, and reflected on that creative partnership in Translating for Rituparno (Jadavpur University Press, 2024).
