WINNERS OF 2017 GAYATRI MEMORIAL AWARDS FOR LITERARY EXCELLENCE
Each winner received a $500 cash award and a plaque with a citation. Our heartiest congratulations to the winners!
Uddalak
Bharadwaj (Houston, TX)
Uddalak received his high school and college education in West Bengal and his PhD degree from Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. As an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center, he is busy with his research on anti-cancer drugs . However, he still finds time to write poems (and translate poems from other languages to Bengali). He has published many poems in Bengali publications such as DuKool, Sharad Arghya, Orchid, Prothom Alo, and Bhashabandhan. Uddalak’s poems mainly dwell on love in its varied forms -- and the frictions and upheavals it often causes. The award recognizes him for his imaginative and heartfelt rendering of human emotions.
Suvro Datta (Seattle, WA)
Suvro was born and brought up in Kolkata, and came to the States for higher studies in the mid-eighties. He received his MS degree from Carnegie-Mellon University, and his PhD degree from the University of Washington. Although trained as a physicist, he has changed profession several times. He has worked as a space scientist, a camera merchant, a biomedical engineer and a robotics engineer. But he has always loved to write. He has written short stories and poems in Bengali whenever he has found free time in his busy life. Suvro has published short stories in DuKool and other magazines and is the founder/editor of a popular website dedicated solely to limericks in the Bengali language. The award recognizes Suvro for his short stories that focus on the rich textures and values of family life and social interactions.
Satya Jeet was born in Kolkata and received his early education there. Following a year at IIT-Kharagpur as an Architecture major, Satya Jeet came to the US to complete his undergraduate studies. Moving on to graduate studies in film, he joined the TV industry. Honing his photographic skill across the US at small television stations, he was picked by CBS Television in New York as a cameraman for their documentary and news division. Satya Jeet shot numerous episodes of the CBS news magazine ‘60 Minutes’. He was awarded an Emmy for cinematography for Public Service Programming. As an author, satya Jeet has published a seven-part series of narratives, My Life in Media, that has artfully captured the intoxicating conflicts between restlessness and determination, between ambition and indifference, between life and the images one creates of that life on TV. The award recognizes Satya Jeet’s unusual abilities to write about life’s ups and downs with grace, humility and candor.