Sarah Anjum Bari

Daily Star Books editor Sarah Anjum Bari speaks with Fahmida Azim about her work with The Insider and about the responsibilities of visual storytelling.

‘Nil Chhaya' connects the Indigo Revolt to the oppressions faced by present day garment factory workers in Bangladesh.

The evening of September 8 at The Daily Star Centre saw an outpouring of verses to a live and very interactive audience. Daily Star Books and SHOUT jointly launched our series of Slam Poetry Nights—an evening, every month, of verses recited in the spirit of creative freedom.

Free to enter and open to any citizen, aged 18 and over, of a Commonwealth country, the prize accepts short story entries written in English and translated to English, as well as stories written in Bangla, Chinese, French, Greek, Kiswahili, Malay, Portuguese, Samoan, Tamil and Turkish languages. 

The comics portray the experiences of the Uyghur community under the anti-Muslim police state imposed in China. The story includes testimonies given to the United Nations Human Rights Council and condensed by Anthony Del Col and art direction by Josh Adams.

The book includes excerpts from Syed Waliullah's diary, snapshots of his editorial for Contemporary magazine, handwritten edits on his pieces for Shaogat magazine, and a comprehensive bibliography of the author's work and achievements.

Hoichoi’s Kaiser, released on July 8, 2022, is part tribute to the genre of detective novels and part beckoning call for viewers to return to the excitement of reading books. Everything from the premise—based heavily on Rakib Hasan’s series of detective novels called Teen Goyenda—to the set design, character development and plot twists, rely on books as both objects and intellectual stimuli.

We call Dhaka a noisy city, but hardly ever do I feel like the noise stops at our doorsteps.

It is a story of discomfort. Of calm, ruthless violence. A drag-your-hands-down-to-uncover-your-eyes gaze at the oblivion we practice not only during Eid holidays, but on any regular day in Bangladesh. 

From the trailer it looks like Zoya Akhtar's Archies has a wider cast of main characters than Riverdale, but what we want to see is the original comics' innocence revisited.

If you’re part of social media’s book-reading community in Bangladesh, you’ll remember the initial slump in and then an outburst of posts on how much people were reading books.

In “Mother’s Milk”, a short story by Tahmima Anam which appears in Our Many Longings: Contemporary Short Fiction from Bangladesh (Dhauli Books, 2021), an unnamed narrator gives us brief snatches of her life as she attempts to endure…something. One can’t really call it an incident; it is, seemingly, more a state of being that requires her to keep joy at bay. Consciously, deliberately.

A designer and illustrator whose work focuses on human rights, feminism, and South Asian identity, Pakistani artist Shehzil Malik has just created an artwork based on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's novella Sultana's Dream (1905).

So many words have been used to describe this nation in the last 50 years. Started from a bottomless basket, and along the way we’ve been called resilient, passionate, corrupt, greedy, full of warmth.

The version of Bangladesh we received in Babu Bangladesh (2019) was astonishing.

Sand, water, memory—the grainy, elusive grace they share pervades the experiences making up Sri Lankan author Anuk Arudpragasam’s second novel, A Passage North (Hamish Hamilton, 2021), shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.

The SOP, in a way, is a conversation with the admissions committee.

In Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi, whose review rests atop this article, the narrator labels time not by calendar dates but by the things that happen to him—the birds who visit his wing of the world, the tides that come swinging or gently.

In Midnight's Borders (Westland Publications, 2021), author and photographer Suchitra Vijayan travels the 9,000 miles of India's borders to understand what Partition did to individual lives and communities, and how it continues to incite violence, displacement, prejudice, and trauma among those who live in the border regions.

It wasn’t until 2001 that a Bollywood film would unpack for me how friendship truly works—friendship that goes beyond the melodrama of a Sholay or a Kuch Kuch Hota Hain, that navigates the trickier terrains of conflict, miscommunication, and the clashing of irrational egos in everyday life. Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai (2001) turned 20 this year, but it remains a cult classic not only because it revolutionised storytelling in the Indian film industry of its time, earning a place in university syllabi on filmmaking, but also because it introduced a genre and way of thinking that was missing from Bollywood films until then.