Kalpana Raina’s move from finance to translated literature was not a sudden departure from books. After studying English literature and pursuing a PhD, she entered finance when academic jobs were scarce and worked in the field for 25 years. Her literary interests continued alongside that career; by 2019 she was backing translation initiatives and serving on literary boards, and in 2024 she joined a collaborative translation of stories by her uncle, Kashmiri writer Hari Krishna Kaul.
How Raina’s career moved from literature into finance—and back
“I started life, you know, as a student of literature,” Raina told the Yale MacMillan Center in 2024. She said she was working toward a PhD in English literature before switching to finance because jobs in academia were unavailable. She then spent 25 years in finance, a career she said worked well for her. Yale MacMillan Center’s 2024 interview describes how that professional experience later informed her approach to bringing a translation project together.
The shift was a change in how she participated in literary life, not a break from it. In a 2019 interview with Scroll.in, Raina was described as a senior executive with financial experience and a board member of media organizations, including Words Without Borders (WWB). She was also helping finance Yali, a translation initiative run by Sangam House in Bengaluru. Those are roles reported in 2019, not a statement of her current positions.
What Raina supported as a patron
Raina described Yali as a way to help emerging translators and small publishers, with mentorship and support for translations in and out of Indian languages. The interview reported translations involving Hindi, English, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Kashmiri during Yali’s first two years. Rather than treating translation as a task one organization could solve alone, Raina argued for a collaborative ecosystem of publishers, organizations, philanthropy and practitioners.
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The need for that ecosystem is easy to see in the range of work involved: funding can help a translator devote time to a project, mentorship can strengthen the work, and publishers can bring it to readers. In the same 2019 interview, WWB’s 2018 publication output was reported as 145 authors from 46 countries translated from 29 languages. Those figures describe that year’s output as reported in 2019, not the organization’s current totals.
How patronage led to Raina’s own translation work
A family visit to India shortly before the pandemic brought Raina back to stories by Kaul that she had heard growing up but had not read. Her father read them aloud. Raina, who spoke Kashmiri but could not read it, felt that earlier translations had softened elements of Kaul’s voice. She initially thought of organizing a fresh translation, using a process she likened to assembling an investment project: find collaborators, coordinate the work and see it through. She eventually became a translator herself. Her account is in a Literary Hub essay.
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For Now, It Is Night
For Now, It Is Night: Stories by Hari Krishna Kaul is a collaborative English translation by Raina and three other contributors, not a solo translation. Yale says the collection was released in March 2024 and describes it as the first translated collection of Kaul’s Kashmiri stories published in the United States. The book makes Kaul’s stories available to English-language readers while reflecting the collaborative method Raina had earlier supported as a patron. Yale’s interview and March 2024 event listing describe the project.
How translation support can take different forms
Raina’s work with Yali illustrates one model: mentorship and support for translators and small publishers, with a focus on movement between Indian languages and English. Other programs serve different needs. These examples show the range of support; they are not interchangeable, and details such as eligibility and application cycles should be checked on the programs’ own pages.
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| Program | Support described | Who or what it serves |
|---|---|---|
| Yali, run by Sangam House | Mentorship for emerging translators and support for small publishers; its first two years included translations involving Hindi, English, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Kashmiri, as reported by Scroll.in in 2019. | Emerging translators, small publishers and translations in and out of Indian languages. Historical description from Scroll.in’s 2019 interview. |
| PEN/Heim Translation Fund | PEN America says the fund began with an endowed gift of $730,000. Its page does not establish a current award amount in the cited information. | Literary translation projects; the fund’s current terms should be checked on PEN America’s program page. |
| New India Foundation translation fellowship | The fellowship page describes a six-month grant of ₹6,00,000 for translation of eligible nonfiction from ten Indian languages. The current application cycle and criteria require confirmation on the official page. | Translators of eligible nonfiction; details are on the New India Foundation fellowship page. |
The scale of need is also reflected in PEN America’s 2026 account: the PEN/Heim Translation Fund had supported nearly 200 in-progress literary translations from more than 35 languages since its establishment in 2003. That cumulative figure is not an annual award count. The distinction matters: a small mentorship initiative, a grant for an individual translation and a program supporting work across many languages address different parts of the publishing path.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why this career path matters
Raina’s story connects financial experience with literary work without suggesting that finance was merely a detour. Her career gave her practical experience organizing complex work; her continued interest in literature and cultural plurality shaped what she chose to support. The translation of Kaul’s stories then brought those strands together: she moved from helping build conditions for translation to taking part in the demanding work herself.
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In her 2019 interview, Raina also named three translated books as recent favorites: Hanne Ørstavik’s Love, translated by Martin Aitken; Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, translated by Lorin Stein; and Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar, translated by Srinath Perur. This is a snapshot of what she recommended then, not a claim about her current reading list.
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