Bashabi Fraser author page

Bashabi Fraser biography

Bashabi Fraser CBE is a poet, children’s writer, editor, translator and academic. She is Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University and Director of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies. She has also worked as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and has taught creative writing in universities, schools and community settings.

Fraser’s writing spans poetry, children’s literature, plays, literary criticism and work on connections between Indian and Scottish culture. Her children’s books include Topsy Turvy and Just One Diwali Night, both published by Dasgupta & Co in 2004. The two fantasy stories combine prose and verse and draw on English and Bengali literary traditions. She also edited Rainbow World: Poems from Many Cultures, published by Hodder Wayland in 2003.

Her other books include the poetry collections Tartan & Turban, From the Ganga to the Tay, Ragas and Reels and Letters to My Mother and Other Mothers. Scots Beneath the Banyan Tree: Stories from Bengal, created with artist Gurupada Chitrakar, brings together storytelling and visual art. Fraser has also written extensively about Rabindranath Tagore, including the critical biography Rabindranath Tagore, published by Reaktion Books in 2019.

Her poem My Mum’s Sari, illustrated by Zoe Barnish, was published for the BBC’s Word Waves Bitesize series in 2019. Fraser was named an Outstanding Woman of Scotland by the Saltire Society in 2015 and received the Word Masala Foundation Award for Excellence in Poetry in 2017. She was appointed CBE in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to education, culture and integration in Scotland.