Nilotpal Roy [নীলোৎপল রায়] (born 19th June 1978) is an Indian writer, thinker, literary critic, and commentator on culture. He is a bi-lingual novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, and short story writer. He writes with equal flair in two languages — in English, and in his vernacular Bengali. So far, he is best known for his bold, maverick, and unforeseen styles of writing, as well as for his unconventional ways of thinking

He feels James Joyce and Nirad C. Chaudhuri to be his occidental and oriental ‘spiritual fathers’ respectively; and apart from being a ‘self-proclaimed disciple’ of Borges, Bataille, Beckett, Burroughs, Vonnegut, Perec, Markson and many others; he does also consider authors like Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Eliot, Mayakovsky, Nietzsche, Kafka, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Genet, Ionesco, Pinter, Camus, Dostoevsky et. al. to be his ‘soul’s companions’.

Nilotpal claims himself to be a ‘counter-intellectual’, because he feels that it is worse to be a ‘refined mediocre’ than being a ‘crude mediocre’, and prefers to be a ‘counter-intellectual’ to a ‘pseudo-intellectual’. He never calls himself an ‘author’ as he rather prefers the term ‘penman’ which is his own coinage.

As an eccentric cerebral creature, Nilotpal believes that all and every piece of creative work should essentially be an inventive piece of ‘ecriture’, that drifts ‘genre-less’ somewhere in-between fiction, non-fiction, prose, poetry, autobiography, memoirs etc. and eventually, successfully culminate into ‘a psychological quest’, ‘a mental juggling’, ‘a kind of self-exploration’ — for the author, during the process-of-writing, as well as, the same, for the readers, during the process-of-reading of each of them. He believes that’s what makes one a true ‘cerebral writer’.

About his writings, it is said that every single piece he pens, caters itself as a literary vortex where all the plentitude and indigence of his capacity as well as incapacity to write with arduous symmetries and language-labyrinths, co-exist. In his books, the idiosyncratic ramifications of heterogeneous themes, reciprocated with multitudinous diversity of styles, provide many a corpus of interpretations for the readers.

In fact, (in his own words), he does not write. He ‘nilotpalise’; ‘in-between the lines’, and ‘in-between-in-between the lines’. Like Milan Kundera’s poet–protagonist Jaromil, he detests the pettiness that makes life semi-life and men semi-men. His lethally venomous texts are essentially ‘reactionary, provocative, audacious and anomalous’, which challenge the readers and make them feel the crisis they are living amidst — a challenge which for sake of coping with, if even the Almighty and the Devil have to but helplessly ally an emergency entente, they get vanquished.

The readers cannot read his books; rather his books read the readers, exposing their psychic genitals; making them feel aware as well as ashamed of their own identities, making them question the worth and meaning of their futile existing entities; just as he himself goes on unmasking his true ‘I’ tirelessly in all his ‘nilotpalisings’, — a venture to fatally poison his already moribund reader comrades, as we all know, like cures like.