Alipurduar, 05th January: Soubhik Dey Sarkar of Alipurduar is all set to be felicitated in this year’s Sahitya Akademi Award as the second Bengali litterateur from North Bengal. Soubhik, a teacher by profession in the English department of Govind High School is receiving the said award for his translation into Bengali of the autobiography of a Dalit Telugu family titled ‘My Father Baliya’ by Telugu writer YB Satyanarayana.
Soubhik Dey Sarkar is the second Bengali litterateur after Amiyabhushan Majumdar from North Bengal to be honoured with the Sahitya Akademi Award. The teachers are also proud of his success. On 30 December, the Sahitya Akademi issued a press release announcing the names of this year’s Sahitya Akademi Award recipients. Along with Soubhik Dey Sarkar, 21 more people are getting felicitated with the ‘Translation Sahitya Akademi Award’. Every year, Academy Awards are given for a total of 22 languages in the country. Reportedly, this year 22 recipients will be given copper letters in the form of the Sahitya Akademi Award and a cash amount of Rs 50,000 will be handed over.
In this regard, Soubhik Dey Sarkar said that he has a lot of love for translation literature. In 2017, he got attracted to Telugu literature and took him about a year and a half to translate YB Satyanarayana’s autobiography of a Dalit Telugu family called ‘My Father Baliyana’ into Bengali. After the book was published in Bengali, there was a good response from the readers, and getting awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award will encourage him to do more new works on literature.