Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree and Provincials; Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal, a work of literary criticism; Missing: A Novel; My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories; and two collections of poems, Out of Syllabus and VIP: Very Important Plant; she has translated (with an introduction) Jagadish Chandra Bose’s essays in The Man Who Made Plants Write. Her poems, essays and stories have been published in The Paris Review, Orion, Lit Hub, The Point, Granta, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, LARB, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Minnesota Review, Emergence Magazine, The Common, The White Review, Berfrois, The Journal of South Asian Studies, American Book Review, among other places. She is now Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, India.
A Suitable Agency is representing The Man Who Made Plants Write, Sumana Roy’s luminous translation of the eminent scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose’s seminal essays on plants and their ability to feel and respond to stimuli. It will be published by HarperCollins India in July 2026.