Shomit Dutta

Shomit Dutta is a playwright, translator, teacher and amateur cricketer.

Stumped, his first play to be produced professionally, has its first production in Bath, Cambridge and London and a second production shortly afterwards in Dublin. His earlier works include Changing of the Guard, performed at the O’ Reilly Theatre in 2016 and a version of Aristophanes’ Birds performed at the Oxford Playhouse in 2000. He is currently developing two more plays, one about two Second-World-War magicians and the other about an encounter between Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman. He is also working on a play about the baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi.

Shomit has had three volumes of Greek tragedy published: Sophocles’ Ajax (Cambridge University Press 2001); Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Oedipus, Euripides’ Medea and selections from Aristophanes’ Frogs and Aristotle’s Poetics (Penguin 2004); and Aristophanes’ Wasps, Women at the Thesmophoria and Frogs (Penguin 2007).

While completing a D Phil on ancient Greek comedy and tragedy he taught at Oxford and Cork Universities. He has also taught Latin and Greek for many years at several schools.

He also writes book reviews – mainly fiction and books on the classical world and cricket – and articles for newspapers and journals, including The Guardian, The Observer, The Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman and The Nightwatchman (a.k.a. The Wisden Cricket Quarterly).

Shomit has been playing cricket all his life, and has been an avid member of Gaieties Cricket Club for over twenty years.