Leesa Gazi is a British-Bangladeshi writer, actor, scriptwriter and filmmaker. She’s also the joint artistic director of a London based arts company, Komola Collective. She was the scriptwriter and performer on Six Seasons and A Golden Age at the Southbank Centre, London. Gazi’s recent play Aleya Twist is a Bengali adaptation of the British classic Oliver Twist. It has reimagined Oliver Twist as a young girl. Gazi also wrote, directed and produced several CVE (Counter Violence Extremism) short films for a UK-based Counter-Extremism think tank in 2017 and 2019. Gazi was the concept-developer, co-writer and performer on Birangona: Women of War, nominated for The Offies 2014, which she later developed into the documentary film called Rising Silence, on the lives of rape survivors in the aftermath of the Liberation War of Bangladesh. The film won the Best Documentary Award 2019 at the Dhaka International Film Festival, the 2019 Moondance Winner in the feature documentary category (USA), the Asian Media Award for Best Investigation 2019 (UK), the Award Of Merit 2020 by the Accolade Competition (USA), the Best Documentary Feature and Best Message at the 2020 Top Indie Film Awards (Japan) and the Best Feature—Foreign 2020 at the Queen Palm International Film Festival (USA).

Shabnam Nadiya is a California-based Bangladeshi writer and translator. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of the Schulze Fellowship (2013) at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; the Steinbeck Fellowship at San Jose State University (2019) for her novel- in-progress Unwanted; and a PEN/Heim Translation Grant (2020) for her translated manuscript of Bangladeshi writer Mashiul Alam’s short fiction. Her translation of Mashiul Alam’s story, ‘Milk’, won the 2019 Himal Southasian Short Story Contest.

Nadiya’s published translations include Moinul Ahsan Saber’s novel The Mercenary (Bengal Lights Books, 2016; Seagull Books, 2018) and Shaheen Akhtar’s novel Beloved Rongomala (Bengal Lights Books, 2018).The manuscript of this translation of Leesa Gazi’s debut novel Hellfire was shortlisted for the Käpylä Translation Prize.