Saradindu Bandyopadhyay (1899-1970) was born in Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh. His first literary venture was a book of poems published in 1919. While still a student at Vidyasagar College, Calcutta, he got married in 1918. Subsequently he studied law, and then dedicated himself to writing. In 1938, Saradindu moved to Bombay to work on screenplays for Bombay Talkies and later for other banners. He worked in Bombay till 1952, when he gave up his ties with cinema and moved to Pune to concentrate on his writing. He went on to become a popular and renowned writer of crime fiction, ghost stories, historical romances and children's fiction in Bengali and received the Rabindra Purashkar for his novel Tungabhadrar Teerey. Sreejata Guha has an MA in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She has previously translated Picture Imperfect, a collection of Saradindu Bandyopadhyay's Byomkesh Bakshi stories, Taslima Nasrin's novel French Lover, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay's Devdas and Tagore's A Grain of Sand, Home and the World and The Prince and Other Modern Fables for Penguin.