The Youth

A translation of the Bengali novel Yubok Yubotira, first published in 1967, The Youth is remarkable for its realistic portrayal of the lives of a group of young men and women and their strife to find the meaning of their existence. In his foreword to the second edition, the author writes that this was a kind of a journal of the lives and times of his friends and by extension, the youth around him. The confusions and inner turmoil of the characters, captured in vivid detail, are powerfully evocative of a crucial phase of life. The reader will not find it difficult to identify with the men and women who people its pages.


Sunil Gangopadhyay (born 1934) is arguably one of the most popular writers of present day Bengal. Poet, journalist, novelist, script-writer and dramatist - he has been all of these at different times. He began his literary career as a poet and stormed into the arena of the novel with a trendsetter, significantly titled Atmaprakash (self-revelation 1966). After that, he has spun out novel after novel with contemporary Calcutta and its young men and women as their recurrent theme. His novel Sei Samay won the Sahitya Akademi Award for 1985.