Selina Hossain was born on June 14, 1947. She is considered one of the leading authors in modern Bengali literature. She has published twenty-one novels, seven collections of short stories, four collections of essays and four collections of children's stories.
Her works are a moving account of the contemporary social and political crises and conflicts as well as the recurrent cycles of the life of the struggling masses. Quite a few of her novels have been translated into Indian regional languages and into French, Russian, and English. Her novel Hangor Nadi Grenade (A Shark, a River, a Grenade) is considered a seminal novel about the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh. Until recently she served as the first woman Director of the Bangla Academy, the state-financed autonomous body. She has received a number of literary awards, including the
prestigious Bangla Academy Literary Award (1980). In 1994-95 she won a Ford Foundation Fellowship for her novel Gayatri Sandhya!. She lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
