Sarah Anjum Bari

The River Tales (2021) is a series of graphic novels for children, commissioned by Asia Foundation’s ‘Let’s Read Asia’ digital library project and produced by HerStory Foundation in an effort to raise awareness about Bangladesh’s heritage and culture. Sarah Anjum Bari, editor of Star Books, speaks to Katerina Don, curator at HerStory Foundation, writer Anita Amreen, and artist Sayeef Mahmud about their processes of research, writing, and graphic designing for the series.

History often has a way of challenging our biases towards our present. Perhaps the one thing common to humans of all generations is our steadfast belief that our own time, unlike any other time in the past, is the most developed, the most inspiring.

On February 22, 2021, The British Library hosted “Sultana’s Dream: Contemporary Fiction of Bangladeshi Origin”, a free virtual session on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s feminist utopian novella.

While writing a text, a literary text in particular, many authors tend not to think about its afterlife. Imagining, experiencing, and putting the story down on paper takes precedence during those moments of creation.

For anyone looking to immerse themself in the literary culture of Bangladesh, Professor Razia Khan Amin’s name and presence are unavoidable.

On October 9, 1965—a day before the World Children’s Day celebrations—the Engineering Institute of Dhaka rang with the melody of young voices, their footfalls and bright costumes. Children from across the two Pakistans had been invited to take part in a competition of musical performances.

Having lost his family, the journey of a Muslim man digging a hundred graves to enter shapes the story of The Grave, the first Bangladeshi film to be made in English.

In a near-perfect echo of today’s world, Nobel Prize-winning Elfriede Jelinek’s On the Royal Road: The Bergher King (Seagull Books, 2020) is stuffed breathless with metaphors, innuendoes, and anecdotes as it satirises US President Donald Trump.

The Amar Ekushey Boi Mela will be held virtually in February.

On November 1, 2020, author Shaheen Akhtar was awarded the 3rd Asian Literary Award for the Korean translation of her 2004 novel Talaash—which traces the lives of Birangona women decades after the 1971 Liberation War.

Tahmima Anam’s play Shahrazad, written for UK-based arts organisation Komola Collective and live streamed on October 29, 2020, adopts the

An adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca seemed especially well-timed, with its theme of imprisonment at home, as well as the timeless pull of social expectations on one’s identity.

Rumaan Alam is interested in contradictions—our presumptions of who should own what, in the textures of modern life.

Bright and cold on a winter afternoon, in the hours leading up to lunch, the kitchen of a Bengali family sizzles with tension. Refrigerated meat is thawed and spices are crushed and pestled.

Something that has always fascinated me about Bangladeshi literature is it’s attachment to and exploration of space—be it in prose, poetry, or music, almost all Bangladeshi and even Bengali literary work engages with how we are impacted by land, home, country, season, and other natures of charged atmosphere.

A good book stays with a reader long after they’ve read the last word and placed it back on the shelf. It leaves an impression on the mind, whether because the action was exhilarating, the characters raw and real, or because reading it felt like coming back to a home you never knew you had.

Diversity can seem jaded when it is employed for the sake of appearing “woke”.

In the Palace Museum of present-day Beijing, 10 stones of about 90 cm height and 60 cm diameter contain some ancient Chinese symbols.

Shahidul Alam’s The Tide Will Turn (2019) is a book of absences. In the aftermath of the road safety student movement in 2018, those of us who followed Alam’s arrest and the ensuing global backlash will remember the letter he received from writer and activist Arundhati Roy.

“A nation that does not respect its mothers is destined for destruction.”