Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)a Bengali poet, Brahmo Samaj philosopher, visual artist, playwright, novelist, and composer whose works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A cultural icon of Bengal and India, he became Asia's first Nobel laureate when he won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature.William Radice was born in 1951 in London. He is a poet and a scholar and translator of Bengali, and has written or edited nearly thirty books. He has also translated Tagore's short stories and his novel, The Home and the World, for Penguin.