Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar is a doctor by profession and the author of a collection of short stories, The Adivasi Will Not Dance (2015); two novels, The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey (2014; which won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar) and My Father’s Garden (2018); and a novel for children Jwala Kumar and the Gift of Fire: Adventures in Champakbagh (2018). He also translates into English from Santali, Hindi, and Bengali. His translation of Manoj Rupda’s Hindi novel Kaale Adhyay (2015) into English as I Named My Sister Silence has been longlisted for the 2023 JCB Prize for Literature.