Maliha Khan

Hamida Begum's* husband had beat her yet again. But this time was different. He had also uttered talaq three times, essentially divorcing her according to the Islamic customs of the Rohingya community.

Razia Sultana is a Rohingya lawyer and educator in Bangladesh. She is currently one of 16 women activists featured by the Nobel Women's Initiative for their work as change makers in their societies.

The Storm is a tale of multiple compelling characters from around the world but all tied back to a crucial time and place in South Asia—a storm based on the real 1970 Bhola cyclone.

Testimonies gathered by the UN, various non-governmental organisations, and foreign government fact-finding teams in Bangladesh are being used to get legal justice for the Rohingya

Short stories are in. Or is the short story dead? Is it seeing a resurgence? The genre seems to be in need of constant justification despite established and novice writers alike constantly churning out short stories.

A multitude of languages can be heard around the refugee camps in Cox's Bazar. There are the Rohingya refugees themselves who speak Rohingya; some also speak Burmese.

A section of the Kutupalong-Balukhali camp is visibly different from most other parts of the camps. The hill is dotted with shacks in close proximity as usual, but which have sturdy leakproof roofs and extra tarpaulin sheets covering the walls to protect from the monsoon rains.

Deep in the Kutupalong refugee camp is the headquarters of an organisation calling themselves the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights.

18-year-old Faisal Mahmud, a student of class XII, was injured when a truck ran over him near Shanir Akhra on August 1, while he and his friends were checking the licences of vehicles on that road.

In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath writes about a young woman, Esther Greenwood, experiencing the publishing industry on a summer internship, as well as life in New York City, for the first time.

The number of female workers departing Bangladesh is on an upward trajectory, 1,21, 925 in 2017, according to Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET) data. The stories of female migrant workers in the Middle East have been well documented as have those of male migrant workers in Europe.

A 'secret' memorandum of understanding (MoU) between UN agencies and the Myanmar government, a draft of which has been leaked online, revealed that Rohingya refugees cannot expect much change back home on their proposed return. While the UN is yet to publicly release the final MoU, the fact that the Rohingya themselves had not been consulted has been criticised by the Rohingya community.

There cannot be a book more for our times than Mohsin Hamid's Exit West which came out last year, at the peak of the European migration “crisis”. Hamid's earlier The Reluctant Fundamentalist too tackled contemporary issues of identity, Islamophobia, and disenchantment with US foreign policy, against the backdrop of 9/11.

Rubel Ahmed from Sylhet had gone to the UK on a short-term working holiday visa in 2009 and started working as a chef. After working at several restaurants and starting to send money home, the 26-year-old applied for leave to remain in the UK. Denied, he was detained and sent to Morton hall immigration removal centre in Lincolnshire (with others awaiting deportation) in July 2014, according to UK reports.

73-year-old Boidhonath Chondro Shutrodhar is one of the last remaining master carpenters in the country making traditional river boats. Living by the Jamuna river in Pabna, he started working at the age of around 20 under an ustad. In his early days making boats, he would earn just two taka per day.

Matuail landfill, located about eight kilometres from Gulistan in the south of Dhaka, is one of two landfills serving Dhaka city. Spanning 100 acres, the site is used by the Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC) to dispose of its municipal solid waste. Now 23 years old, it will reach capacity in a year at most. The Amin Bazar site, used by the Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC), has already expired last year. Putrid waste swarming with flies and rodents towers in hills tens of metres high.

The committee that decides the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature every year is in shambles. The Swedish Academy, rocked by a sexual harassment scandal against an individual close to the committee,

In November 2015, a 14-year-old girl in the Central African Republic (CAR) said that two peacekeepers attacked her in November as she was returning home near Bambari airport. Peacekeepers at the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) base were stationed there to guard the airport and allegedly committed numerous such acts of sexual abuse and exploitation.

Giving birth was nothing new to 32-year-old Somuda, a mother of six. The only extraordinary circumstance was that she now lived in a small shack on a hilltop of Balukhali which merges with the Kutupalong settlements to make the largest refugee camp in the world.

On the busy Mirpur Road of Dhanmondi, students mill around outside a standard university building, converted from a shopping mall. Standing out, yet blending in, among the students are several Somali and Nigerians students—a small but growing body adding to foreign students studying at public and private universities in Dhaka.