Shah Tazrian Ashrafi

This year a ticketing system was imposed. As such, sales were lower than expected.

Despite the popularity of TV, cinematic rights come with their drawbacks. While it is thrilling for a novelist to have their work taken up by a production house, sometimes their work ends up in a forgotten corner for a long time.

Besides the brilliantly unconventional addition of an Intelligence Agent as the main audience, the story’s language, unflinchingly charged with a humorous tone, is enough to keep a reader’s eyes glued to the screen.

In May 2022, Joanna Chiu won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for her debut nonfiction book, China Unbound: A New World Disorder (Hurst, November 2021).

For me, the key takeaway from “Lucky” would be the perspective one can gain into living in the shadow of war, which creates around its victims a prison of undying misery.

Lesedi is not “right in the head”. He avoids talking and discards words that do not make sense to him like garbage.

Too often, the representation of Muslims in arts and culture has been tainted by the shadow of “extremism”.

When one begins reading Karen Jennings’ An Island (Picador India, 2021), one might find it hard to believe that an atmospheric novel with such fluid prose initially struggled to find a publisher.

As of December 31, 1919, a total of 1.4 million Indians were recruited to various theatres of the First World War. Among them, approximately 563,369 were “followers or non-combatants”.

Typical of any Samanta Schweblin story from her International Booker-longlisted collection, Mouthful of Birds (OneWorld, 2019), a sense of anxiety is strongly perceptible here, especially through the characters Fi and Pe. One grows afraid of them as they start showing both lovingly caring and Big Brother-like tendencies. What heightens the ominous halo surrounding these two is the hostages’ inability to translate their emotions; why would someone who provides for you not give you a way out?

An 81-year-old woman is strolling about in her farm, reeling from nostalgia, dead leaves crunching under her feet. She is planting newly bloomed flowers in an empty pig pen.

In 1857, a wave of uprisings sparked through India in a bid to overthrow the British rulers. The Sepoy Mutiny was the first time Indian soldiers rose against the British East India Company in the face of corruption and unjust social reforms—including ruthless land taxes that unfairly penalised the working class.

A new British Council-funded project, Write Beyond Borders, is set to kickstart its inaugural episode from May-October 2021. The program is designed for “emerging writers” of South Asian background, who can be based anywhere in the UK, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. The deadline for application, which should include a covering letter and a writing sample of no more than 2,000 words, is April 30, 2021.

“Once there was a severe flood in the month of Magh.

In the 1890s, many South Asians were brought to Uganda by the British Empire for administration and development purposes.

In 2017, Orni Hasan found a disheveled kitten around Dhanmondi Lake, deciding to keep him. Before the decision, she looked for safe adoption options, but could not find any.

Olpo Kothar Golpo Gaan includes 200 of these iconic songs.

I still remember how there was so much commotion around the language issue in East Pakistan right after the 1947 Partition. In 1948, Liaquat Ali Khan brought amendments that sought to make English and Urdu the lingua franca of Pakistan, even though a majority of Pakistan’s population spoke in Bangla.

Writing a book is a journey. Then, the long and arduous journey to having the book published begins.

I stumbled across a short story written by Aoko Matsuda called “Quite a Catch” in the Wasafiri literary magazine last month.