From A Handmaid’s Tale (McClelland and Stewart, 1985) to The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008),
Someone in a chat group somewhere called Sally Rooney the ‘Taylor Swift’ of the literary world, and now I cannot unsee it.
In January 2023, I was sitting in the crowd, listening in on a panel at the 10th and possibly the final edition of the Dhaka Lit Fest. Sheikh Hasina had already been in power for almost 15 years, and it felt like the sun would never set on Awami League, at least not in my lifetime.
The mid-month slump is probably the most demoralising part of the Sehri Tales challenge, even for long-time Talers.
I love reading about popular inventions which were originally created with a different purpose in mind. For instance, did you know that bubble wrap, that oh-so-ubiquitous packing material that doubles as a stress-relieving toy, was initially intended to be wallpaper? Imagine that! On the one hand, you have hours and hours of bubble-popping fun. On the other hand, probably a trypophobe’s nightmare, so maybe not. Either way, March Chavannes and Alfred Fielding, the co-inventors of the material, thought they had a dud on their hands until IBM started looking for better packing materials for their delicate new computers. The rest is history.
I remember the Ramadan of 2020, which was the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and also the year my friends and I decided to shift the Sehri Tales to our own platform and open it up to a wider audience.
Originally from Massachusetts, international development consultant Elizabeth Shick was living with her family in Yangon, Myanmar from 2013-2019 and got to witness not just Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy win the 2015 elections by a landslide, but the military crackdown on Rakhine state that led to the Rohingya exodus into Bangladesh in 2017.
As the novel progresses, you peel back layers of history between Claire and her grandparents and realise that the Korea issue isn’t as straightforward as our protagonist imagined.
Falling into the comfortable rhythm of a familiar form, it took scant minutes to bang out a silly poem that made me laugh and melted away all the tension, and it took me back to why I created Sehri Tales in the first place.
While talent might determine the quality of the writing, and many of our Talers have these in buckets, the basic skill is actually a result of something more mundane: consistent practice.
This story, which originally began as a short story, features a headstrong heroine putting her desires above what society expects of her, in order to realise her destiny.
You’ve got a fantastic project, and have found a potential investor for this. They’ve given you two minutes to deliver a killer pitch and convince them you’re worth it.
Watch this print space for the Talespeople's weekly reflections on creative writing.
Part memoir, part magical realism, this is a story about identity and the idea of home.
The characters crackle with life, quirky and contradictory, despicable and sympathetic in turns.
Pictures are really the most basic form of story-telling, aren’t they? I imagine our ancestors sat around fires doing shadow theatre. They painted on cave walls long before writing came along.
If there is one thing that worries me a little, it is that the strong trend for themes of sexual violence that began to appear during lockdown, continues to be favoured by a significant number of our domestic writers.
It’s hard to believe, but we only moved out of the sandbox provided by Litmosphere (thanks Rubaiya and Ramisa Chowdhury) two years ago, and shifted Sehri Tales © to an independent platform in 2020! We hope you’ve been enjoying the stories so far.
