• Boi Mela sees no activity under lockdown

    As per government mandated instructions, the Ekushey Boi Mela opened at 12 pm today while the rest of the city observed a lockdown. No visitors were seen at the entrance for the first 45 minutes of opening.

  • A son’s tribute to Rafiq Azad’s poetry

    Selected Poems on Love, Environment & Other Difficulties (Chitra Prokashani, 2020) is a collection of poems by the late Rafiq Azad, one of the most prolific poets of Bangladeshi literature, translated from Bangla by his son Ovinna Azad.

  • Where’s the cake?

    It’s party time in the animal kingdom. A turtle just happens to be in charge of making a birthday cake. He’s small and he’s slow but he has a plan. He started early because he knew speed wasn’t his strength.

  • Gothic fiction writ anew in Daisy Johnson’s ‘Sisters’

    One of 2020’s more positive highlights was Daisy Johnson’s stunning sophomore effort, Sisters (Riverhead Books). The novel, a Gothic-domestic drama, starts with siblings September and July in the backseat of a car, on their way to the “Settle House”.

  • Behind the book covers

    Having graduated from the University of Dhaka’s Faculty of Fine Arts, Sabyasachi Hazra’s work first gained momentum in 2005 and today, is a mainstay during the Ekushey Boi Mela.

  • European languages dominate the 2021 International Booker Prize longlist

    The longlist for the prestigious 2021 International Booker Prize was announced on March 30, 2021. Nominees stem largely from Europe, with a few entries from South America, Africa, and Asia rounding out the list.

  • The view from the West

    After half a century from where we began, Daily Star Books will spend all of this year—the 50th year of Bangladesh—revisiting and analyzing some of the books that played crucial roles in documenting the Liberation War of 1971 and the birth of this nation. In this sixth installment, we revisit both Khadim Hussain Raja’s A Stranger in My Own Country (Oxford University Press, 2012), in which a retired general gives often problematic views from West Pakistan’s perspective, and Pakistani journalist Anthony Mascarenhas’ The Rape of Bangladesh (Vikas Publications, 1971), a pivotal book in changing world opinion on the then-underreported genocide of East Pakistan.

  • Did we need a Boi Mela amidst a pandemic?

    I was in the middle of a hectic shift at Dhaka Medical College Hospital a few days ago when I heard a close colleague was down with fever and severe body ache—symptoms typical of COVID-19. By the next day, his whole family had been critically affected. It is not very likely that his family will come out of this wrath unscathed. Instances like this do not shock me or my colleagues anymore; this has been routine for the last year.

  • Boi Mela updates as of Friday

    The Ekushey Boi Mela, which was inaugurated on March 18, 2021, is stretching out across an expanded space of 1500,000 sq ft to accommodate the 834 stalls allocated to 540 organisations this year.

  • The unfortunate Asians of Uganda

    In the 1890s, many South Asians were brought to Uganda by the British Empire for administration and development purposes.