Sabarna Roy started writing from an early age. “I wrote poems in English and Bengali during my university years between 1984 and 1988,” he shares. “In 1986, my first book, which was an anthology of English poems, titled Pain, was published and it created a stir in the student community of Kolkata. At the end of 1988, I joined the corporate sector and wrote on and off between 2000 and 2005 and was an oral storyteller,” he says.
Roy talks about the turning point in July 2007, when he felt that, if he did not write, he might not be able to survive. That was when he started writing seriously. Roy’s first book, Pentacles, was published in 2010. Talking about how he found his roots in literature and writing, Roy says that since early childhood, he had been interested in interdisciplinary learning. “My engineering studies did not stop me from reading literature, history or other social sciences or to juggle between the two professions of a senior engineering professional and an author seamlessly. If you have the right kind of passion, you will find the time. Otherwise, you won’t,” he says.
Speaking about his literary feats and published works, Roy says, “I have six literary works, till date. They have been critically acclaimed and bestsellers at some point in time,” adding that, “I mostly write about love, loss, happiness, defeat, surrounding my city of Calcutta, or Kolkata, in the time span between the 1970s and the present. In this city, one can find the universal themes that cities all across the globe are concerned with because of aggressive modern urbanization.”
Many critics while appreciating his work have said that there are many layers in his writing and that Roy captures human emotions and behaviour very realistically. Talking about his writings and their themes, Roy elaborates on the many issues that any individual might be facing at the moment.
“The underlying theme of my writing is how an individual is being pushed to an order in this rapid hyper-modernization and hyper-consumerism. Apart from human and societal decay, I also write about ecological and environmental degradation very passionately,” he says. Sabarna Roy has also published a technical book, Articles on Ductile Iron Pipelines and Framework Agreement Contracting Methodology, where he has attempted to elaborate on various issues in irrigation application.
To his credit, Roy is also a renowned international speaker on matters of ecology and environmental issues. “I must say that I’m a strong believer in the fact that the havoc and mass destruction that has been unleashed on the ecology and environment by humankind in the last 250 years has not happened in the preceding 5,000 years of existence. It is time to wake up. Climate change is for real. I’m a strong believer in the Paris climate accord. It is incumbent on all of us as individuals, communities or nations, to incrementally de-escalate our carbon footprint and speak on the subjects passionately.”
Sabarna Roy was awarded the Literoma Laureate Award for fiction in 2019 and the Literoma Star Achiever Award for 2020. He also tells us about his upcoming book. “I’m presently writing a book on the pandemic and I wish to publish this book around the spring of 2021. This is a book on the human story during the pandemic, as I have seen it,” says Roy.