Down with the Poor!

By Shumona Sinha and Teresa Lavender Fagan

Over the course of a night in police custody, a young woman tries to understand the rage that led her to assault a refugee on the Paris metro. She too is a foreigner, now earning a living as an interpreter for asylum seekers in the outskirts of the city. Translating the stories of men and women who come from her country of birth, into the language of her country of citizenship, Sinha's narrator finds herself caught up in a tangle of lies and truths, propaganda and lived experience, laying bare prejudices on all sides.
Down with the Poor! which borrows its title from a poem by Baudelaire peers into a harsh reality and reveals with an acerbic sense of humour the dislocated responses to poverty and desperation. Sinha's queasy view of European asylum systems offers a deeply emotional account and morally complex critique of the bureaucracies and mindsets upholding the status quo. This is the story of a woman who, little by little, is contaminated by the violence of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Les Fugitives
• Release date: Jul 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781838490478

Shumona Sinha

Shumona Sinha is a poet and novelist who grew up in Calcutta, West Bengal. In 1990 she won Bengal’s best young poet award. She started learning French age 22 and moved to Paris a few years later. From 2005 to 2007, she translated and published several anthologies of contemporary French and Bengali poetry in collaboration with her then-husband, the poet Lionel Ray. She has since been naturalised French and her first novel Fenêtre sur l'abîme, was published in 2008. Her second novel, Assommons les pauvres! won the Prix Populiste 2011 and the Prix Valéry-Larbaud 2012. Her third novel, Calcutta (2014), received the Prix du rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises, awarded by the Académie française and the Grand Prix du Roman of the Société des gens de lettres. Her most recent novel, Le testament russe, was published in March 2020 by Éditions Gallimard.