Beyond stereotypes: Rupert Grey’s ‘Homage to Bangladesh’
Rupert Grey, a descendant of Charles Grey and best known professionally as a leading libel and copyright lawyer stood against this statement. “If Bangladesh is a basket case,” Grey tells The Daily Star, “then it is so in the best possible way.” For him, the term collapses under the sheer vitality of the country. A single square metre of a Bangladeshi street, he argues, holds more energy than entire neighbourhoods in London. Where life in England often unfolds in rigid routines, Bangladesh thrives in spontaneity—where a hanging lighter at a tea stall can become a moment of shared choreography.
25 January 2026, 12:24 PM
Books & Literature
FLASH FICTION / The rickshaw artist
24 January 2026, 01:52 AM
Books & Literature
FLASH FICTION / Pirouette of a phoenix
24 January 2026, 01:48 AM
Books & Literature
POETRY / Memories
24 January 2026, 01:36 AM
Books & Literature
BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Lessons in Chemistry : A novel that reads you
22 January 2026, 15:54 PM
Books & Literature
EDITORIAL / Why read?
22 January 2026, 00:00 AM
Books & Literature
THE SHELF / 7 new books to look out for in 2026
22 January 2026, 00:00 AM
Books & Literature
EVENT REPORT / Md Ashanur Rahman receives the International Creative Arts Award 2025
19 January 2026, 17:38 PM
Books & Literature
NEWS REPORT / NSU DEML launches inaugural certificate course in creative writing
17 January 2026, 16:00 PM
Books & Literature
INTERVIEW / Reclaiming the unwritten: Kanika Gupta on colonialism, embodiment, and the art of remembering
Gupta shares her insights on reclaiming forgotten histories, reimagining myths, and connecting ancient narratives to contemporary ecological and social concerns.
22 November 2025, 11:51 AM
Books & Literature
REFLECTIONS / Moon, memory, manifesto: A personal, lyrical essay on Atrai
21 November 2025, 18:28 PM
Books & Literature
REFLECTIONS / The risk of becoming: Notes on translation and transformation
7 November 2025, 18:33 PM
Books & Literature
THE SHELF / 5 books on women’s everyday terror to read this Halloween: The horror that persists
31 October 2025, 13:45 PM
Books & Literature
THE SHELF / 8 books to read if you’re fascinated by the louvre heist
30 October 2025, 13:30 PM
Books & Literature
EVENT REPORT / Unveiling ‘The July Resolve': Stories of resilience & resistance
14 January 2026, 16:01 PM
Books & Literature
EVENT REPORT / Singing a 900-year-old song: Exploring Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with Zeba Rasheed Chowdhury
3 January 2026, 10:26 AM
Books & Literature
EVENT REPORT / An eco-critical look at Sultan: Reading the manuscript of ‘Sultan Er Krishi Jiggasha’
With the aid of Duniyadari Archive, Pavel Partha’s soon-to-be-published book Sultan Er Krishi Jiggasha is a new addition, which looks at Sultan’s work from an eco-critical perspective.
8 November 2025, 11:43 AM
Books & Literature
EVENT REPORT / Zia Haider Rahman on his award-winning novel at NSU’s Colloquium series
7 November 2025, 11:48 AM
Books & Literature
NEWS REPORT / “Curious love letter”: Wole Soyinka responds after US cancels visa
He responded to the situation with grace, mentioning “I like people who have a sense of humour".
30 October 2025, 10:45 AM
Books & Literature
EVENT REPORT / Stepping into the uncanny world of Franz Kafka
26 October 2025, 11:55 AM
Books & Literature
THE SHELF / 6 books that I read at the end of last year… I hated 5 of them
You know that feeling when you crack open a new book and you’re convinced that this is the knight in all its paperback shining armour that will save you from your reading slump? Yeah.
7 January 2026, 18:00 PM
Books & Literature
TRIBUTE / Remembering Razia Khan Amin: The pen that forged a generation’s courage
28 December 2025, 12:19 PM
THE SHELF / 5 books to rescue you from brainrot
17 October 2025, 14:45 PM
6 books that bring Bangladesh to life for diaspora teens
10 October 2025, 19:11 PM
BOOK REVIEW: GRAPHIC NOVEL / The tragedy of ‘Demon Slayer’
10 October 2025, 14:30 PM
THE SHELF / 7 lyrical fantasy books: Where prose becomes poetry
7 October 2025, 11:14 AM
BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION / In which Arundhati gives it those ones
1 October 2025, 18:00 PM
FICTION / The truth factory
12 September 2025, 18:54 PM
BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION / The Indosphere and its discontents
10 September 2025, 18:00 PM
Essay / Sonnet of the riverbank: Remembering Al Mahmud, the poet
29 August 2025, 19:49 PM
ULAB Creative Writing Certificate Course returns
This year’s sessions will be facilitated by eminent academics, writers, and professionals in their field, such as Professor Kaiser Haq, Professor Syed Manzoorul Islam, Professor Azfar Hussain, Professor Shamsad Mortuza, Arifa Ghani Rahman, and Maisha Hossain.
12 July 2023, 12:50 PM
Literary giant Milan Kundera dies at 94
Czech-French writer Milan Kundera, author of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", has died aged 94, the Milan Kundera Library said today
12 July 2023, 11:50 AM
Browsing les bouquinistes of Paris
It was impossible to explore all the kisoks in a single outing, with there being 900 of these bookstalls in total hosted by around 200 sellers, straddling both sides of the Seine riverbank.
9 July 2023, 12:50 PM
“Fragile Things”: How ghosts and spirituality make it into writing
Participants, including the show’s hosts and guests, picked up discarded pebbles, photo frames, children’s artwork, and other knick knacks—all fragile things collected and displayed by the author.
7 July 2023, 04:00 AM
‘Plants of the Quran’ explores flora dating back 1400 years
Dr Shahina Ghazanfar, the author of a series of books on the flora of the Middle East who compiled this compendium, explains: “This is not a religious book but about history and culture. It promotes the pleasure of research and learning, I hope as much for my readers as for myself”.
6 July 2023, 06:25 AM
Shamim Reza creates new frontiers with his new poetry collection
Over the last 30 years, he has received multiple national and international literary awards for his work. He is, currently, the vice-president of PEN International, Bangladesh chapter.
6 July 2023, 06:13 AM
Single wife, double life
When DC Clements misses, by just a few hours, the opportunity to recover the abducted Kylie—who was being held prisoner by an unknown captor in the initial period after she disappeared—the police officer becomes obsessed with finding out what actually happened to the missing woman.
6 July 2023, 05:55 AM
The pirates of Madagascar
In this posthumous effort, 'Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), Graeber posits, in characteristic fashion, that the Enlightenment would not have happened if not for the pirates around the Malagasy coast.
5 July 2023, 14:47 PM
The comfort of rereading old books
I often feel overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of new books that I still want to read—so many stories, so little time—and understand that this is an ambition that rereading can only delay.
2 July 2023, 10:48 AM
Home is where the hurt is
This is a beautiful book about a teenager looking for the answers in life, the joys of found family, and the experience of love in its many forms.
28 June 2023, 08:56 AM
How Pakistan viewed ‘71: Academics and publishers discuss
To understand the attitude of the adversaries of the Liberation War, I went to collect the data for this book and found that Pakistanis are defending themselves.
22 June 2023, 10:18 AM
Into the intersection of identity & violence
It is worth considering that, according to historian Yuval Noah Harari, we may not be able to fully evade violence, as our evolutionary past has instilled certain inclinations within us that could be linked to violence.
22 June 2023, 08:44 AM
'Independence': A painfully poignant Partition story
Divakaruni has a message to send with this novel. To her, independence entails not just liberation or freedom from subjugation, it also means doing the right thing for oneself and for the people around us.
22 June 2023, 08:16 AM
Riverdale can be anytime, anywhere
Sweet, colourful, and funny, Archie comics were one of the only graphic narratives available for people who weren’t interested in superheroes and really gritty, edgy comics like Batman.
22 June 2023, 07:53 AM
Scrounging revelations out of music
I don't remember at what point in life I learned to recognize the fallacy behind the not-like-other-girls phenomenon and discarded it for an all-encompassing love for female friendship and solidarity, in acceptance of femininity in all its forms. But I do know that Taylor Swift played a significant role in it.
20 June 2023, 12:46 PM
‘Good books will always find good readers’: Dipankar Das
The crux of the issue is whether or not good books are reaching the intended readers.
20 June 2023, 05:27 AM
Cormac McCarthy: A great American novelist
For a nation that cannot boast of a Cervantes or Rabindranath, there will always be a need to find an All-American, a unifier who assures them of their place in the hallowed halls of literature. Cormac McCarthy, more than any other writer of his generation, was equipped to shoulder that title.
19 June 2023, 12:54 PM
A day of festivities to celebrate 19 years of Baatighar
Baatighar has organised an evening of music and discussion at its Dhaka outlet on June 18, 2023, from 6 PM onwards.
18 June 2023, 10:44 AM
Across the Spider-Verse: Faithfulness to the comics
Bendis intentionally put a stark difference between Peter and Miles, so that comic book fans would not feel that their favourite web-swinger was being replaced by just another goody-two-shoes, just with a racial make-up switch.
16 June 2023, 12:59 PM
Can we process trauma through writing?
Iffat Nawaz, together with The Daily Star’s Books & Literary Editor, Sarah Anjum Bari, will discuss the act and impact of processing traumatic memories through writing.
15 June 2023, 10:55 AM