Fakrul Alam

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Dr Fakrul Alam is a Bangladeshi academic, writer and translator. He is Professor of English at the University of Dhaka and has written widely on literary matters and postcolonial issues. As one of the leading academics of the country, Professor Alam has earned widespread recognition for his works on South Asian and postcolonial writing. Among his publications are book-length studies of Daniel Defoe and Bharati Mukherjee.

Alam is perhaps best known for his translation of Jibanananda Das, the great Bengali poet. Earlier translators, most notably Chidanananda Dasgupta and Clinton B. Seely, had tried to convey the elusive quality of Das's poetry to an Anglophone audience. When Alam's volume Jibanananda Das: Selected Poems came out in 1999 on the occasion of the poet's birth centenary, it was greeted with widespread acclaim. The book has proved to be popular with readers since then. The first edition having sold out, a second, expanded edition was published in 2003. Alam's work is now regarded as perhaps the best (and certainly the most wide-ranging) translation of Das in the English language.