Ranjan Sen And The Long Way Around: A Banker’s Return To Stories That Refuse Easy Answers
After decades in international banking, Ranjan Sen debuts with To Cut A Long Story Short, a thoughtful collection shaped by lived experience and human insight.
There are writers who arrive early and writers who arrive fully formed. Ranjan Sen belongs to the latter. His debut book, To Cut A Long Story Short, published in October 2025 by Om Books International, does not read like a tentative first outing. It carries the assurance of someone who has spent decades observing people under pressure, listening closely, and storing away lives, moments, and contradictions for the right time.
Born and educated in what was then Calcutta, Sen’s early years were shaped as much by classrooms as by curiosity. He studied economics and went on to complete an MBA from Delhi University, but his real education seemed to happen alongside formal degrees. As a student, he won a string of public speaking awards, worked as a radio presenter, and wrote features for national newspapers. These pursuits, seemingly scattered, quietly trained him in voice, rhythm, and the discipline of addressing an audience. They also hinted at a pull toward storytelling that would wait patiently for its turn.
That turn came much later. In the meantime, Sen built a formidable three-decade career in international banking, working across multiple countries in leadership roles. His professional life took him from complex financial centres to emerging markets, culminating in senior positions such as Head of International Countries for HSBC in the Middle East and North Africa and later as Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Ahli United Bank with operations spanning several countries. It was a career defined by scale, structure, and accountability, far removed on the surface from fiction. Yet it gave him something writers often struggle to acquire: an intimate view of human ambition, fear, compromise, and moral ambiguity.
In 2021, Sen stepped away from corporate life. The decision marked a pivot rather than a retreat. He turned his attention to early-stage investing while also returning, openly and deliberately, to what he calls his childhood sweetheart: writing. The years since have been productive and focused. His short stories have appeared in respected international journals in Singapore and the United States, as well as in India, including The Contemporary Literary Review of India and the English Journal of the Sahitya Akademi. These publications did not frame him as a banker trying his hand at literature but as a writer whose work stood on its own.
To Cut A Long Story Short gathers eleven such stories. They move across time, geography, and social worlds with quiet confidence. An escaped fugitive, a murderer who refuses to behave like one, an illegitimate son in the Maurya court, and a man clawing his way out of poverty in Marxist Bengal. At first glance, these lives share little. Sen does not force them into neat symmetry. What binds them instead is a shared vulnerability, the nearness of death, and the uneasy choices people make when cornered by circumstance. The collection ranges from historical political drama to psychological suspense, from romance in the age of the Company Sahib to modern banking ruthlessness, and from slice-of-life realism to the faint stirrings of the occult. Each story opens a door rather than delivers a verdict.
What stands out is the absence of literary ornament for its own sake. Sen writes with restraint. His sentences are clear, his pacing deliberate. There is an understanding that drama does not need raised voices, and that the most unsettling moments often arrive quietly. Years spent in boardrooms and across cultures seem to have sharpened his instinct for what people leave unsaid and how power, fear, and loyalty shift in small, telling ways.
Away from the page, Sen’s life retains its grounded humour. He credits his wife, Manisha, and his best friend, who, as he puts it, took him on as a husband project many years ago. They live in Delhi with their college-going son, surrounded closely by family, a detail he shares with the same dry wit that surfaces in his fiction. It is this balance between seriousness and self-awareness that gives his public persona texture.
Ranjan Sen’s journey does not fit the familiar arc of a writer driven by early acclaim or literary ambition alone. It is the story of someone who gathered experience first, across countries and roles that demanded clarity and courage, and then turned back to the page with something worth saying. With To Cut A Long Story Short, he enters Indian English fiction as a voice shaped by life rather than removed from it, offering readers not lessons but recognition.
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