Nrusingha Tripathy, poet, short story writer, editor, translator, social activist and do-gooder, was born in 1945 and educated in the universities of Utkal and Allahabad. He was a lecturer in economics at Kendrapara Autonomous College for a couple of years before joining the Indian Revenue Service in 1969, from which he eventually retired as a director general (chief commissioner) of income tax in 2004. He has published nine volumes of poetry and four collections of short stories. He pursued his religious studies and obtained a Ph.D. from Calcutta University in 2012.brHe has routinely spurned every award including the Jhankar Award, the Sarala Award, the Istahar Award, the Jivanrang Award and the 2003 Sahitya Akademi Translation Award. Literature, he believes, is its own reward; and awards only create bad blood.brHe lives in Bhubaneswar with his wife, son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren, and supervises a speciality medical centre for the deprived and the disadvantaged

His short stories -- collected in four volumes -- portray a fascinating world of the ordinary and mundane but in such a way as to stimulate the reader's imagination and leave them asking for more. Each story is like a snapshot in time and the evocative description and slightly mysterious subject matter leaves behind a sense that we have scratched the surface of a vast and private world that we can only ever experience through reading.nbsp;brThe stories are about life and death, love and loss, trust and infidelity, transition, yearning and growth, jealousy and kindness, and all are imbued with a sense of the time and place from which they originate and all create a sense that we know a little more about life and humanity than we did before.