Akhtar Hossain

Akhtar Hossain was a Bangladeshi children's literature writer, rhymester, journalist and editor whose books and editorial work shaped generations of young readers. He died on 24 September 2026 at Bangladesh Medical University in Dhaka while receiving treatment, aged 80. Cultural organisations and news outlets remembered a Bangla Academy Literary Award laureate who had spent decades writing rhymes, stories and plays for children and editing volumes that carried national memory into school-age hands.

He was born on 1 November 1945 in Nurullapur village of Lalpur Upazila, Natore District. His father was T.I.M. Sikandar and his mother Ayesha Khatun. Hossain began in journalism, working at media houses that included Janakantha and Prothom Alo, before establishing himself as a writer and editor of children's literature. Public accounts credited him with around eighty books of rhymes, stories, short stories and plays, and with editing a further thirty to forty volumes. Colleagues later stressed that he led a simple personal life even as his name became familiar across Bangladesh's children's book culture.

His edited collections ranged across Bangabandhu, the Liberation War, anti-communal literature, patriotic songs and children's poetry, as well as selected works by O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant, Maxim Gorky and Mark Twain for younger Bangla readers. He wrote biographies of Language Movement martyr Abdul Jabbar and of young martyrs Matiur Rahman and Habibur Rahman, and contributed extensively to the five-volume Shishu-Bishwakosh published by Bangladesh Shishu Academy. During the 1971 Liberation War he took part in the cultural movement; his song "Swadhin Swadhin Dike Aj Jagchhe Bangalira, Ar Rukhbe Tader Kara" was broadcast by Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra and became widely known.

In 2012 he received both the Bangla Academy Literary Award and the Agrani Bank Shishu Academy Children's Literature Award for contributions to children's literature. In 2015 he received the Kabir Chowdhury Children's Literature Award. Other honours cited in obituaries included the Alaol Literary Award and further Bangladesh Shishu Academy recognition. After his death, Udichi and news reports said the public would be able to pay respects at the Central Shaheed Minar in Dhaka before burial in his native Nurullapur. What remains is a shelf of rhymes, stories and encyclopaedia pages that kept children close to Bangladesh's language, history and imagination.