Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree (2019) and Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries (2025); Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (2024), a work of literary criticism; Missing: A Novel (2018); My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories (2019); and two collections of poems, Out of Syllabus (2019) and VIP: Very Important Plant (2022). She teaches at Ashoka University.
Sumana Roy
Articles
A Language for Sharing
Sumana Roy considers Michel Chaouli’s “Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins.”
How Does the Writer Say Etcetera?
Sumana Roy ponders the linguistic and aesthetic significance of “etceterization.”
The IIC School Versus the JLF School of Indian English
Sumana Roy on how the vernacularization of the English language has affected Indian political and cultural life.
Creative-Critical, Inc.
Guilt Lit
The Provincial Reader
Sumana Roy reflects on the loss — or the proliferation — of the provincial reader.
On Being Raised by New Critics in a Small Indian Town
What literary studies lost when the New Critics were dethroned.
On Gravity and Play: In Conversation with Amit Chaudhuri
Amit Chaudhuri on literary activism, alternative modernisms, and the comedy of friendship.
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2FSomethingSpeakstoMeWhereCriticismBegins.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2FMA_I081893_TePapa_Threshing-in-the-Cotswolds_full.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F202309Vernacular-English.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F202011Eliot-Sacred-Wood.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F202009Vidal-Cain.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F202002RoyNewCritics.png)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F201903RoyChaudhuri-1.png)