Bidisha

Bidisha SK Mamata,[1] (born Bidisha Bandyopadhyay,[2]) known professionally as Bidisha, is a British broadcaster, film-maker, and journalist specialising in international affairs, social justice issues, arts and culture, and international human rights.[3][4]

Bidisha
BornBidisha Bandyopadhyay
(1978-07-29) 29 July 1978
London, England, UK
OccupationWriter, broadcaster, critic, film-maker
LanguageEnglish
NationalityBritish
Alma materSt Edmund Hall, Oxford
Period1993–present

Publishing and broadcasting under her first name only, Bidisha began writing professionally for arts magazines, such as i-D, Dazed and Confused, and the NME, at the age of 14, and published her first novel at 18.[5] She writes for The Guardian and The Huffington Post[1] and works as a TV and radio presenter for the BBC, presenting programmes such as Woman's Hour.

She also does outreach work in UK detention centres and prisons, in affiliation with literary and human rights organisation English PEN.

Early life and education

Bidisha is an only child; her parents, both lecturers in information technology, emigrated from India in 1972.[6][7] She was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's School for Girls, an independent school in Elstree in Hertfordshire, followed by St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford,[5][8] where she studied Old and Middle English. She then studied at the London School of Economics, where she gained an MSc in Moral and Political Philosophy and Economic History. She speaks English and Bengali.[9]

Writing

Bidisha began writing for arts magazines i-D, Oyster, Volume, Dazed and Confused, and the NME at 15, after launching a style fanzine at 14 as part of the riot grrrl movement. In 1995, at the age of 16, Bidisha signed a £15,000 book deal with HarperCollins. Her first novel, Seahorses, was published two years later, during her first year at university.[6] During this time she also had regular opinion columns in The Big Issue magazine, The Daily Telegraph and the Thursday edition of The Independent newspaper. Bidisha's second novel, the thriller Too Fast to Live, was published when she was 21. Her third book, Venetian Masters – a travel memoir – was published in February 2008.[10] She was a contributing editor of the women's literary magazine Sibyl and the style magazine 2nd Generation, and has written for The Guardian, the Financial Times, Mslexia, The Observer, New Statesman, and arts magazine The List.[11]

International affairs were the subject of Venetian Masters (2008), which focused on Northern Italy, and Beyond the Wall (2012), a work of reportage from Palestine. In 2013, she became a Fellow of the International Reporting Project run by Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Her role is to focus on international development issues as part of a global network of reporters.[12] Her fifth book, Asylum and Exile: The Hidden Voices of London, is based on her long term outreach work with asylum seekers and refugees.[13][14]

Bidisha was one of the judges for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was announced as one of the judges of the 2010 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.[15] She is a patron of the SI Leeds Literary Prize for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women in the UK.[16][17] Bidisha is a trustee of the Booker Prize Foundation.[18]

Broadcasting and film-making

In parallel with her writing, Bidisha has developed a career as a radio and TV arts critic and presenter.[19] She is a regular guest on The Big Questions and Sunday Morning Live (BBC One), and also appeared as a regular panellist on BBC Two's Newsnight Review (BBC Two). For BBC Radio 4 she has contributed regularly to and presented Saturday Review, Front Row, Archive on Four, Heart and Soul and Woman's Hour.[20] She was one of the regular presenters of BBC Radio 3's flagship arts programme, Night Waves.

On the World Service, she was a guest presenter of the books programme The Word, and was the regular presenter for The Strand.[21] For Radio 3 and Radio 4 she has presented documentaries on Carl Jung, Iris Murdoch,[22] the role of text in art (in Texting Andy Warhol) and The Countertenor.[23] On TV she presented BBC Four's Secret Life of Books series edition on Jane Eyre[24] and the Archive on Four documentary Mustn't Grumble, on complaining.[25]

In 2017, she became a film-maker, directing her first film, An Impossible Poison, which was commissioned by the arts organisation Speaking Volumes for their Breaking Ground: A New British Con_Text showcase of British creative talent. The film premiered in Berlin in November 2017. Her next film project was a series of films called the Aurora series, of which the first is Aurora: All is Well [26](October 2020)

Films

Bibliography
  • Seahorses (Flamingo, 1997) ISBN 0-00-655030-4
  • Too Fast to Live (Duckworth Publishing, 2000) ISBN 0-7156-3008-3
  • Venetian Masters (Summersdale Publishers, 2008) ISBN 1-84024-634-0
  • Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine (Seagull 2012) ISBN 978-0-8574-20398
  • Asylum and Exile: The Hidden Voices of London[28] (Seagull 2015) ISBN 978-0857422101

References
  1. Biography page at The Huffington Post.
  2. "On the Threshold". tes.co.uk. Times Educational Supplement. 20 October 2009. Archived from the original on 5 October 2012. Retrieved 18 October 2012.
  3. Kira Cochrane (21 May 2011). "Bigger the ego, harder the fall". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 25 January 2012.
  4. Bidisha (20 July 2011). "Bidisha: "The opposite to a feminist is an arsehole"". Bidisha-online.blogspot.com. Retrieved 25 January 2012.
  5. "BBC Radio 3 biography". BBC Radio 3. Archived from the original on 22 April 2009.
  6. "On the threshold" Archived 10 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine, The Times Educational Supplement, 21 March 1997. Retrieved 26 May 2010.
  7. Bruce King (2005). The Oxford English Literary History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199288366.
  8. List of famous graduates of St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
  9. "Interview: Bidisha – Anisha Jhina". Ziptang.velvetbug.com. Retrieved 25 January 2012.
  10. "Venetian Masters: Under the Skin of the City of Love" at Amazon.
  11. Bidisha (15 July 2010). "Bring me sunshine – Gilbert and George at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art". The List. Edinburgh Festival Guide.
  12. Fellows & Editors – International Reporting Project
  13. Mehvish Arshad, "Bidisha calls for greater understanding of the lives of asylum seekers" Archived 6 February 2015 at the Wayback Machine, Asia House, 26 January 2015.
  14. "Asylum and Exile: The Hidden Voices of London" Archived 6 February 2015 at the Wayback Machine, FreeWord.
  15. "Book Trade Announcements – Judges Announced For The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2010". booktrade.info. 2 July 2010. Archived from the original on 22 March 2012. Retrieved 25 January 2012.
  16. Patrons Archived 13 November 2014 at the Wayback Machine, SI Leeds Literary Prize.
  17. Bidisha, "'This is an issue at every level of publishing.' The SI Leeds Literary Prize tackles race, sex, diversity and literary fiction", 27 February 2014.
  18. "Man Booker Prize announces global expansion" Archived 16 December 2014 at the Wayback Machine, Man Booker Prize, 18 September 2013.
  19. "The comeback kid: Whatever happened to feisty, mono-monikered teenage author Bidisha?" The Independent, 2 March 2008. Retrieved 25 July 2010.
  20. "Woman's Hour 26-07-2010" BBC.CO.UK Retrieved 25 July 2010.
  21. "Bidisha" BBC Profile 28 April 2006 26 July 2010
  22. "An Unofficial Iris", BBC Radio 4 – Archive on 4, 1 June 2014.
  23. BBC Radio 4 – The Countertenor, 24 November 2011.
  24. "The Secret Life of Books", BBC Radio 4.
  25. "Mustn't Grumble: The Noble British Art of Complaining", Archive on 4.
  26. Bidisha (13 October 2020), Aurora: All is Well (Short), Alessia Patregnani, retrieved 2 November 2020
  27. Bidisha (13 October 2020), Aurora: All is Well (Short), Alessia Patregnani, retrieved 2 November 2020
  28. "Asylum and Exile" Archived 28 January 2015 at the Wayback Machine, University of Chicago Press.
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