The Filter Koffee Podcast: Taslima Nasreen and translator Arunava Sinha on her latest book, Shameless

The Filter Koffee podcast  is not an interview. It is a window into the minds of the most interesting people that the host has met — a peek into their craft, passions and convictions. It is about a great conversation — the kind that enhances your worldview from what it was 40 minutes earlier. And much like coffee itself, the ingredients make the experience.

The Filter Koffee Podcast is all about creating those experiences every week through hand-picked guests, who are among the most interesting minds in India. They talk about their journeys, body of work, convictions, inspirations and the tales they lived to tell.

Karthik Nagarajan, cryptographer-turned-researcher-turned-screenwriter-turned-marketer sits down with creators, activists, business leaders, and the occasional neighbour for an unstructured chat

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Shameless

Taslima Nasreen and Arunava Sinha discuss Nasreen’s latest book, Shameless, which was published by HarperCollins as an e-book earlier this year. Shameless is the sequel to the renowned Bengali author’s most popular and controversial work, Lajja. Nasreen also talks about living in quarantine with her cat in Delhi, her days in exile away from her homeland Bangladesh and struggles of writing in Bengali away from Bengal. Sinha, who has translated Nasreen’s Shameless , details his process of translation. He reveals how he always tries to avoid reading the original book beforehand and instead reads as he translates because he believes then “the discovery process is very raw and that also percolates into the translation.”

Taslima Nasreen is a writer, physician, feminist, secular humanist and a human rights activist. She is known for writing on women’s oppression and criticism of religion, as a result of which she has been forced into exile for the last 25 years. She is the author of over 40 works of fiction and non-fiction in Bengali which have been published in over 30 different languages worldwide.

Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction, non-fiction and poetry from India and Bangladesh into English. More than 50 of his translations have been published in India so far. He teaches translation and creative writing at Ashoka University.

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