Shah Tazrian Ashrafi

This past August, Dhaka’s speculative fiction magazine 'Small World City' enjoyed their first anniversary. The magazine, over this last year, has published some of the more striking works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry coming out of the country

If the country’s literary potential is not given generous support, we may never create favourable conditions for aspiring writers to devote time and energy to the art

Weaving the grand themes of politics and history, the book is a revelation into how the ordinary lives within a country are buffeted by constant changes.

What struck me the most about these stories is the firm, unflinching, and confident authorial voice sneaking up on and dictating the reader’s thoughts, orienting them to feel sympathy for the characters no matter how unlikeable they are.

While Canada, and now some programs in the UK, have also started offering the degree, it is in the United States that it is most common and rigorous.

This means you can submit a manuscript on your own, without a literary agent.

Martell’s narrative journalism is a lesson for those in the field as to how a writer can instil empathy for the others around. The reader can taste affection for both the animals and humans in his storytelling.

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.