Sarah Das Gupta
Sarah Das Gupta is a History graduate from the University of London who went on to teach History and English in UK in a variety of schools and Colleges of Higher Education. She also lived in Kolkata( Calcutta) where she taught English in Loreto House, a school and college originally founded and run by an Irish, Catholic order of nuns. She remains in touch with many Loreto ex-students. Married to a Bengali journalist,, she wrote book reviews and contributed to a regular feature 'The Calcutta Notebook', in 'The Statesman', the then leading English language paper in West Bengal.
After returning to the UK, Sarah Das Gupta taught in Tanzania in a remote primary school, with a magnificent view of the Rift Valley..The children's enthusiam and wonderful musicality
were a lasting inspiration; The view of hundreds of bright pink flamingos spread along the valley remains an unforgettable sight.
Her final group of students finished their school examinations in her 80th year. There is nothing more satisfying than watching a student's success after overcoming physical and psyhchological barriers.
Sarah Das Gupta's wrting career began when her teaching career ended. It followed a disabling accident which has severely limited her mobility; It was instigated by her elder daughter, herself a successful author. One day, on a visit to her mother, she tossed a writing magazine onto the hospital bed with the comment, 'It's never too late!' This comment developed into an
essay which won a world-wide competition.The rest,as they say,'is history.'
In the last three years, Sarah Das Gupta has published poetry, fiction and essays in over 300 magazines and anthologies on every continent, except Antarctica. She has written on a wide variety of subjects including: the Darjeeling tea gardens, climbing Killimanjaro, lives of beavers, great turtles in the Bay of Bengal, cuitural role of Parisian Cafés, the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, folklore, Indian ghost stories etc, She is beginning to understand such terms as 'flash', 'dribble', 'drabble' which never occured in traditional examination syllabuses! She has a major ambition, to have a chapbook published!