Satikanta Guha was born in Sunamganj, Sylhet (now in Bangladesh). He was educated at Dhaka Collegiate School, Dhaka, and Hare School and Presidency College, Kolkata. He stood first in First Class in the LLB Examination of Calcutta University.

Though his subject of formal study was history, his real love from childhood was literature. From the age of 15 he started editing journals for children: first ‘Benu’, and then ‘Chitra’. This brought him into close personal contact with Abanindranath Thakur and Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar. Later he also edited ‘Rangmashal’ for some time. He set up several publishing houses, publishing books that included Abanindranath’s Rajkahini, Dakshinaranjan’s First Boy and Last Boy, and Shibram Chakraborty’s Baadi Thekey Paliye. In 1954, in association with his wife Prity Lata he founded South Point.

South Point attracted many talented and gifted personalities as teachers: Utpal Dutt, Kamal Kumar Majumdar, N. Viswanathan, and Gita Ghatak among others. In a little over two decades, South Point came to be acknowledged as the world’s largest school in terms of the number of pupils enrolled for an academic year. It enjoyed that distinction for many years. South Point also became synonymous with academic excellence, for year after year its pupils secured ranks among the first ten in all public examinations at the school level. During his lifetime South Point was a home to many organizations, like the Little Theatre Group, Ali Akbar College of Music, Ballygunge Cultural Seminar, and Guru Thankmani Kutty’s school of dance.

In literature, he received the Mouchak Award for his contribution to children’s literature, and the Rabindra Puraskar for his novel, Natyakar.