"Over the course of a night in police custody, a young woman tries to understand the rage that led her to assault a refugee on the Paris metro. She too is a foreigner, now earning a living as an interpreter for asylum seekers in the outskirts of the city. Down With the Poor!, which borrows its title from a poem by Baudelaire, is the story of a woman who, little by little, is contaminated by the violence of the world"--

Shumona Sinha is an award-winning Franco-Indian poet and novelist. Born in Calcutta, Sinha currently resides in Paris. Her second novel, Down With the Poor! (2011), won the Prix du roman populiste 2011 and the Prix Valéry-Larbaud 2012 upon its publication in France. Her work addresses themes of immigration, exile, identity and womanhood.

Teresa Lavender Fagan is a freelance translator who lives in Chicago. She has translated over forty published works of non-fiction and fiction by authors ranging from Mircea Eliade (Journal III: 1970 1978) to Hédi Kaddour (Little Grey Lies; The Influence Peddlers), and Vénus Khoury-Ghata (The Last Days of Mandelstam - shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize), including the Nobel Laureate in Literature Jean-Marie LeClézio (The Mexican Dream: Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations; Mydriasis Followed by To the Icebergs).