Nepali Writers in English: A season to write

This summer, there have been three high-profile book launches in Kathmandu. The season kicked off with the release of Manjushree Thapa's Seasons of Flight, followed by Samrat Upadhyay's Buddha's Orphans and Sheeba Shah's Facing my Phantoms. All events were well attended and heavily publicised in the Kathmandu press. A quieter launch, that of 19-year-old Pradeep Swar's Beautiful People, capped off the literary season in mid-July. Readings and creative writing sessions in the English language, if restricted to a fairly small group, are now a feature of the capital's cultural circuit rather than the exclusively expatriate activity of the past. Furthermore, there are rumblings in the air of a literary festival in Kathmandu next year.

Are they long gone, those days when your uncle (hobby: writing) would sidle up to your father at a family gathering, and press on him two copies of his latest literary effort? When English-language literature was the Hardy Boys, then the latest pulp from Stephen King, and eventually Gabriel García Márquez? As the Salman Rushdies and the Vikram Seths burst onto the global scene, the Nepali reader could hardly claim ownership, and homegrown English-language prose fiction was limited to children's books and the aforementioned vanity ventures. The odd novel, such as D B Gurung's Echoes of the Himalayas and P J Karthak's EveryPlace: EveryPerson were anomalies at a time when Nepal was slowly but surely moving into the slipstream of globalisation, but had yet to find its voice on the international literary stage.