Saymon Zakaria

Saymon Zakaria (born 3 December 1972) is a Bangladeshi folk researcher and deputy director of the Department of Research in the Bangla Academy. He was awarded the Bangla Academy Literary Award in 2020 for his contribution to Bangladeshi folklore.

Early life Zakaria was born on 3 December 1972 at Jungli village under Kumarkhali Upazila of Kushtia District in Bangladesh. He received a Master of Philosophy on The Characters of Rama and Sita in the Popular Versions of the Ramayana in Bangladesh from Jahangirnagar University and obtained a Doctor of Philosophy on the Traditional Theater in Bangladesh: Content and Mode of Language from the University of Dhaka.

Career

He has delivered academic lectures on language, literature, and culture to the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California (Santa Barbara), the University of Washington, the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, and the Sapientia-Hungarian University of Transylvania, IRCI (Japan). Additionally, he has attended and conducted various workshops in France, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Sri Lanka, Turkey, the Kyrgyz Republic, Nepal, the Philippines, Morocco, and different regions of India. He is an editor of Bhābanagara: International Journal of Bengal Studies. He received his PhD on The Traditional Theater in Bangladesh: Content and Mode of Language. His MPhil was on The Characters of Rama and Sita in the Popular Versions of the Ramayana in Bangladesh.

Zakaria joined the Bangla Academy's folklore department as a manuscript editor in 2005. He was the research assistant of the cultural survey project at the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh in 2004, research lead of the UNESCO's Action Plan for the Safeguarding of Baul Songs project run by the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy in 2010, and the sub-editor of the daily Samakal.