She published more than 80 books in Bengali: poetry, novels, short stories, plays, literary criticism, personal essays, travelogues, humour writing, translations and children's literature.

[5][6] Her childhood experiences included World War II air raids, seeing people starving in the Bengal famine of 1943, and the impact of large numbers of refugees arriving in Calcutta after the partition of India.

[10] She was a visiting professor and a visiting creative writer at several universities including Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, Chicago (USA), Humboldt (Germany), Universities of Toronto, British Columbia (Canada), Melbourne, New South Wales (Australia), and El Collegio de Mexico.

[4] Dev Sen was a member of the Social Network for Assistance to People (informally Association SNAP) that published a ground-breaking survey in 2014 that revealed the extent of poverty among the Muslim community of West Bengal.

[citation needed] Dev Sen published more than 80 books in Bengali: poetry, novels, short stories, plays, literary criticism, personal essays, travelogues, humour writing, translations and children's literature.

[5][2][1] She worked with the treatment of women in world epics; she wrote several short stories presenting Sita in a different way from how she appears in the Ramayana.

[5] Dev Sen dealt with a wide variety of social, political, psychological problems like the role of the intellectuals in the Naxalite movement (Ami Anupam, 1976),[5] the identity crisis of Indian writing in English (1977),[5] that of second generation non-resident Indians (1985), breakdown of the joint family, life in old age homes (1988),[5] homosexuality (1995),[7] facing AIDS (1999, 2002),[7] child abuse, obsession, and uprootedness.

[5] Her essays, such as Nati Nabanita (Nabaneeta the Actress, 1983), are considered the best of her prose writing by critic Sanjukta Gupta.

[22] In 1958, she married Amartya Sen, an economist and academician and then a lecturer of economics at the Jadavpur University, who would be awarded the Nobel Prize four decades later.

[2] In addition to Bengali and English, she could read Hindi, Oriya, Assamese, French, German, Greek,[4] Sanskrit, and Hebrew.