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

Traveling by local bus in Dhaka city is nightmarish. But sometimes, things may turn out to be different.

We can’t just wish things away, we can’t disown parts of our culture and country because they don’t fit our particular ideal. That is a cop-out, an easy way out, that is claiming we are pristine, and the dirt lives elsewhere, claiming we are saints and that is not our sin. 

Winter nights are surely the best time for ghost stories or tales of spirits returning from the dead. This year, The Daily Star is preparing for some chilling winter night haunting.

Alice Beck Kehoe (1934-) is a family friend, and I have her permission to use her first name in short for this essay. After reading Alice’s autobiography Girl Archaeologist: Sisterhood in a Sexist Profession (2022), Raudah, my wife, recommended the book to me with confidence that I would love it.

Tahmima Anam, the Bangladesh-born British writer, is known at home and abroad for her spontaneous and vivid writing style. She is widely distinguished as a novelist and columnist with a profound awareness of her native and international culture.

Nineteen performers recited poems in Bangla and English, their topics ranging from nostalgia, personal growth and daydreams to mental health, death, and trauma.

Who is Annie Ernaux?

Ernaux has received the award for her “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” 

“Free light source plus [a] dude I can sit and ruminate with, it’s perfect.” 

Protiti’s poems are mostly ‘bare’ conversational musings exploring ‘selfhood, separation, exile, love and longing’.

The memoir provides a good primer to Nusrat's life as a musician and the legacy he left.

I discover that teaching is more about reading people.

Fanfiction is just a devoted fan's mind asking, "What if?" 

"Alap" is a book of confession, written by two famous writers and intellectuals of India-Pakistan in the aftermath of 1947 partition.

A fine good morning poem

The celebration is incomplete without spending time with loved ones, good food and a pile of books and magazines waiting to be read. 

Publishers are fearing that the number of readers as well as buyers will gradually decrease. 

. In its fourth session of Literary Matters, the discussion focused on the diversity of writing. The guest speakers were Shagufta Sharmeen Tania, the acclaimed British-Bangladeshi writer and Rahad Abir, another up and coming writer currently residing in the US.

On August 21, Fahmida Azim, a Bangladeshi born, Seattle-based artist and journalist, was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary. The winning team—with Fahmida Azim as artist, Josh Adams on art direction, and Anthony Del Cole as the writer—won the award for “How I escaped a Chinese internment camp”, a visual story on a woman who survived the abduction and internment of Muslims in Chinese camps. The comics reveal insider accounts of China’s anti-Muslim measures, particularly their treatment of the Uyghur community in China.

Daily Star Books editor Sarah Anjum Bari speaks with Fahmida Azim about her work with The Insider and about the responsibilities of visual storytelling.