Creative nonfiction / Growing up with a new nation: The Dhaka we once knew

Suhail Aziz’s book, Breakthrough (Book Guild, 2020), is a memoir of a British Bengali and his intertwined personal story of love and prejudice. Aziz is best known within the UK Bengali community for his involvement with the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE).

Zahid sat in a tiny room cramped with men. A ventilator was the only source for its occupants to get air from the outer world. The last time he had talked to his father had been at the Istanbul Airport. He still had his cellphone from Bangladesh. It was the only physical connection he had with his country.

Nobody tells me to search for you as if there’s a timeframe for undertaking such quests! My voice sounds like yours, and often, looking at my arms, I get puzzled,

It is so cheap like it is everywhere- on the highways, under the bridges, disappeared

Abdulrazak Gurnah, this year’s Nobel laureate in literature, seems to come as an admirable choice compared to the Nobel Prize’s controversial recent history.

The epic antedates even the depiction of the famous Trojan war; it is, in effect, the oldest epic found till date.

Bhashan Char has lately become a topic of critical debate in the refugee relocation discourse. It is a reality that comes with a harsh reminder of demographic changes within the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar and the limits of a highly populated state in supporting an incredibly high number of foreign nationals living in its territory.

The Unpublished PhD lecture series, organised by Gyantaposh Abdur Razzaq Foundation, resumed on October 12, 2021 at 7 pm over Zoom after a two year hiatus due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In its eighth episode, researcher and professor of Anthropology at Jahangirnagar University, Manosh Chowdhury, gave an illuminating talk on his doctoral thesis: “Popularizing Project: Some Aspects of Production of Culture and Discourses in Bangladesh”.

Sangat Bangladesh, a South Asian feminist network founded by Kamla Bhasin, held an event in Dhanmondi’s Rabindra Sarobar on Saturday to commemorate the feminist author, poet, development worker, and educator who passed away last month. 

Young-adult books have recently been doing an exceptionally valuable job of incorporating mental health issues into their stories. Following is a list of books that represent various aspects of mental health issues and how people deal with them. 

In celebration of Independent Bookshop Day, Bookworm Bangladesh, located on the Old Airport Road, are offering a 25 percent discount on all imported books for customers personally visiting their shop and 20 percent off on online orders. The offer ends on October 9. 

She lies on the bed, a broken canvas. Fragments and splinters of an old frame, Faded colors of painted priceless picture, Greys and white, crooked dark veins, wrinkled paper skin.  Frames abound on the wall’s fortress,

We stopped talking earlier. Yet there was a chance that I’d run into you. There was a chance of seeing you on the Gollamari bridge buying vegetables.

Countless people cross our path as we walk through this temporal life; but only one or two strike us as people with no darkness within. Mohiuddin Ahmed was one of those unique humans. He radiated pure light, and for those within this light, time always moved peacefully because life seemed to have met all his wants and needs, and as a man so at ease with the ways of life, he effortlessly smoothed out the many negative thoughts of his visitors and friends, just by being who he was.

On the morning of Thursday, October 7, University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh saw the launch of ULAB Press with its maiden publication, Commemorating Sheikh Mujib: The Greatest Bengali of the Millenium (2021).

Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has just been announced as the recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."

Sand, water, memory—the grainy, elusive grace they share pervades the experiences making up Sri Lankan author Anuk Arudpragasam’s second novel, A Passage North (Hamish Hamilton, 2021), shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.

If you are familiar with John Green, you might already know of the immense popularity of the New York Times bestselling author, widely popular for his YA fiction, and often dismissed by critics for the same reason.

I find two distinct types among denizens of the world of letters. There are writers single-mindedly focused on literary production in one genre or more, and others I would call, for want of a better term, literary personalities.

The Politics of Land Law: Poverty and Land Legislation in Bangladesh (University Press Ltd, 2021), a book by Dr Masum Billah, Associate Professor of Jagannath University, was launched in a virtual programme held by UPL on October 2, 2021.