Taslima Nasrin

Taslima Nasrin, a Bangladeshi-Swedish writer, physician, feminist, secular humanist, and activist, was born on 25 August 1962 in East Pakistan. Her father was a physician and professor of medical jurisprudence at several colleges in Dhaka and Mymensingh. After completing her secondary and higher secondary education in the late 1970s, she studied medicine at Mymensingh Medical College, affiliated with the University of Dhaka, and earned her MBBS degree in 1984. During college, she edited a poetry journal called *Shenjuti*. Following graduation, she worked at a family planning clinic in Mymensingh and later practiced in the gynecology department of Mitford Hospital and the anesthesia department of Dhaka Medical College Hospital. Witnessing the trauma of rape victims and hearing women’s despair at giving birth to daughters, she became an atheist and adopted a feminist perspective in her writing. Her literary career began with poetry; she published several collections between 1982 and 1993, focusing on female oppression with graphic language. She later turned to prose, producing essay collections and novels. Her documentary novel *Lajja* depicted a Hindu family attacked by Muslim fanatics. Nasrin’s criticism of Islam and advocacy for women’s equality provoked violent backlash: hundreds of thousands demanded her execution, and in 1993 a radical group offered a bounty for her death. After a 1994 interview in which she was quoted as calling for a revision of the Quran, she faced charges and death threats. She fled to Sweden later that year, ceasing medical practice to become a full-time writer. Her Bangladeshi passport was revoked, and she lived in exile in Europe and North America for a decade before moving to India in 2004 on a renewable visa. She settled in Kolkata, contributing to Bengali newspapers and magazines, but continued to face threats, including bounties for her beheading. She was blacklisted from both Bangladesh and West Bengal under Communist and Trinamool Congress governments, but returned to Kolkata in 2026 after the Bharatiya Janata Party won the state legislative assembly election.