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
‘Eken Babu’ writer Sujan Dasgupta found dead under mysterious circumstances
He was reportedly found lying on the floor of his bedroom, according to the police.
18 January 2023, 12:32 PM
William Dalrymple plays a role in world’s largest Commonwealth heritage conservation programme
The 216-year-old building of the former British Residency of Hyderabad (also known as Koti Residency or Hyderabad Residency) has been fully restored after a remodelling work of nearly 20 years.
16 January 2023, 11:42 AM
Hanif Kureishi's Twitter diary and why he couldn't make it to Bangladesh
"I realised I had to start again as a person and a writer. I had to become a comic writer, a serious writer, a writer who could integrate the madness and most interesting elements on the same page."
16 January 2023, 06:09 AM
Italian man steals unpublished books by award-winning authors
The more than 1,000 stolen manuscripts included a work by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
15 January 2023, 07:20 AM
‘Border Crossings’ hopes to reconcile diasporic identities
Syed Afzal Hasan Uddin says of first generation immigrants that they—who are already grappling with the duality of their multifaceted identities—were not seen as being Bengali enough by their parents.
14 January 2023, 12:18 PM
The art of moderating literary conversations
Rifat Munim highlighted how a moderator can be a catalyst to an engaging dialogue between the panellists and the audience,
13 January 2023, 18:00 PM
Foreign literature is a very precious tool for peace
Daily Star Books’ panel on January 8, Day 4 of the Dhaka Lit Fest sought to take the audience to a more existential aspect of what the festival attempts to do. Who chooses which stories deserve to become books? Who chooses whether news of those books will even reach readers? Does book criticism truly help the flow and business of literature within and across national borders?
13 January 2023, 18:00 PM
Goddesses of Bengal: The living myth of Devi Manasa, Bon Bibi and more
There is absolutely no necessary relationship between the worship of goddesses and the treatment of women.
13 January 2023, 18:00 PM
‘Khandito Nazrul’: Why he is and should be relevant
The difficulty of translation is one of the reasons why Nazrul is not discussed as extensively as Tagore in the west.
13 January 2023, 18:00 PM
Colleen Hoover cancels ‘It Ends With Us’ colouring book on domestic abuse
Readers are questioning how “a coloring book was ever going to ‘tastefully mirror Lilly Bloom’s story’ of violent domestic abuse.”
13 January 2023, 06:32 AM
Local publishers, sales, and the 2023 Dhaka Lit Fest
This year a ticketing system was imposed. As such, sales were lower than expected.
12 January 2023, 11:50 AM
Three literary walks: Nilanjana Roy, Shehan Karunatilaka, Daisy Rockwell
With a Books page you're creating a running history of the ideas and the parallel history or the imagination of a country.
12 January 2023, 11:07 AM
Can we justify censorship in culture?
The panel spoke broadly about censorship, #MeToo movement, mob mentality, cancel culture, JK Rowling, and social media echo chambers.
9 January 2023, 14:51 PM
Russell Banks, praised author of ‘Cloudsplitter’, dies at 82
Banks, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, died Saturday in upstate New York, his editor, Dan Halpern, told The Associated Press. Banks was being treated for cancer.
9 January 2023, 09:15 AM
Dhaka Lit Fest closing: literature too can be a party
The last day of the 10th Dhaka Lit Fest today began on a calmer note.
8 January 2023, 14:59 PM
Dhaka Lit Fest 2023: Kishwar Chowdhury to open a restaurant soon
"I started my journey with a simple dream of writing a book for my children", she shared at the talk.
8 January 2023, 12:16 PM
Dhaka Lit Fest 2023: What the agent does for writers and actors
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.
8 January 2023, 09:15 AM
DHAKA LIT FEST, DAY 3: Big books, big ideas
Author and literary critic Nilanjana Roy moderated a session on "A World Without a Centre", with Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, Bengali litterateur Amitav Ghosh, and novelist and political analyst Pankaj Mishra discussing how novels play a role in shaping a world that lives with the legacy of colonialism, and the of impacts of climate crises and technology.
7 January 2023, 18:00 PM
FIND US AT DHAKA LIT FEST THIS WEEK!
Media platforms that critique literature are, therefore, at the heart of the book ecosystem. They shape a book’s public perception and can bolster (or destroy) sales.
7 January 2023, 12:59 PM
Favourite season
Showers and storms give way
To a surge of sunlight
A fragrance of hope floats in
On morning breeze
6 January 2023, 18:00 PM