Shumona Sinha, born in Calcutta in 1973, has lived in Paris since 2001 and studied literature at the Sorbonne; from 2009 she worked as an interpreter for asylum seekers.
After the publication of Slaughter the Poor! in 2011 (Engl. 2015), she lost her job at the French Migration Service; the novel won numerous literary prizes, the German edition the International Literature Prize in 2016. Her third novel Kalkutta (dt. 2016) also won several awards. In 2017, her novel Staatenlos was published.