Mahmuda Emdad

The 2025 Booker Prize longlist was revealed on Tuesday, July 29, showcasing a diverse ensemble of literary brilliance, with novels that spanned continents, genres, and narrative styles

Graffiti has long played a powerful role in revolutions around the world. From the walls of Paris in 1968 to the slogans of the Arab Spring, street art has served as one of the most immediate and accessible forms of resistance.

“Art is empathy,” Fredrik Backman writes. So is friendship—the kind that stays with you long after the summer ends.The kind you find when you’re 14 and everything is breaking and beginning at once. The kind of friendship that becomes a map back to yourself, years later, when you’re lost in grief, guilt, or even just the quiet ache of growing up. Fredrik Backman’s My Friends is a love letter to those friendships.

To commemorate the milestone, Baatighar will host a series of events throughout the year across all four divisional branches.Ba

Every year, on June 20, World Refugee Day calls on us to remember and hold in our hearts the millions displaced by conflict, persecution, and political upheaval around the world.

These stories subtly highlight how even within patriarchal structures, men, too, are shaped, sometimes twisted by the systems they benefit from.

These decisions hint at an implicit belief that certain genres or readerships require the exclusion of certain genders, whether due to artistic limitations, market considerations, or adherence to established genre conventions.

Begum Rokeya was once described as a “Spider Mother” (makar-mata or makarsha janani) in her biographical account but there is nothing sinister in this metaphor. The image of the spider here symbolises the quiet, patient, and selfless labour of an educator, caring for children who were not her own. Shamsunnahar Mahmud, her close co-worker, wrote: “Day after day in this way, with the blood of her own breast, Spider Mother began to revive hundreds of baby spiders into new life.”