Buku Sarkar is a photographer and writer who works between Calcutta, New York, and Paris. Her writing has appeared in The New and New York Review of Books, n+1, ZYZZYVA, and The Threepenny Review; recipient of the Andrew Lytle Best Fiction of the year award; while her photography has been featured in The New York Times, Art Basel Miami, and exhibited at the International Center of Photography.
Her debut novel Not Quite a Disaster After All was published by HarperCollins India in Dec. 2023 and is now available in the U.S with Flowersong Press. Her photobook Photowali Didi (Fall Line Press, 2023), documenting her five-year relationship with residents of a Calcutta slum, explores themes of identity and belonging across cultures. Her forthcoming poetry collection My Dead Flowers, will be published in December 2025 by Harper Collins India.
Sarkar serves as part-time faculty at the International Center of Photography and offers writing workshops. Her screenplay The Shameless was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section in 2024. Her work examines the complexities of cross-cultural identity, feminine freedom, social stratification and the spaces between worlds—both literal and metaphorical. She is currently working on a novel about two generations of an Indian family in New York, a memoir about living with neurological disorder, endless short stories, and a photographic series exploring women’s relationships with their bodies, building on seven years of documenting her own illness through self-portraits and a memoir in her series “Containment Diaries”