📚Southasia Review of Books - 22 May 2025

📚 22 May 2025

Hello reader,

Heart Lamp (Penguin, April 2025) by the activist and author Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, has won this year’s International Booker prize, becoming the first-ever original Kannada text and first short story collection to take the award!

In her review essay for Himal, Meghna Rao explores the roots of Mushtaq’s literary rebellion, and how Heart Lamp marks many historic firsts for Kannada literature and offers an unflinching look Muslim women’s lives in Karnataka. 

[Read Deepa Bhasthi’s writing from the Himal archives here.]

The roots of Banu Mushtaq’s literary rebellion

Banu Mushtaq’s International Booker-winning ‘Heart Lamp’,  translated by Deepa Bhasthi, marks many historic firsts for Kannada literature and offers an unflinching look Muslim women’s lives in Karnataka

By Meghna Rao | May 2025

This month marks 100 years since the publication of Virginia Woolf’s iconic London story, Mrs Dalloway. In Himal’s pages, Zehra Khan reflects on how Woolf’s influence has shaped not only literary modernism as we know it, but also her own coming-of-age experience as a young writer in Karachi. 

In case you missed it, do also tune in to our recent Southasia Review of Books podcast conversation with the Miles Franklin-award winner Michelle de Kretser on Theory & Practice (Catapult, February 2025). In the novel, a young Sri Lankan woman arrives in Melbourne to research the writings of Woolf and discovers the messy gaps between our ideals and actions. 

Coming of age with Mrs Dalloway in Karachi

A century on from the publication of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’, a young writer recounts how Clarissa Dalloway’s famous walk has spanned London and Karachi, and continues evermore

By Zehra Khan | May 2025

📚🎙️ Podcast of the week

Thomas Bell on a walking history of the Himalayan landscape: Southasia Review of Books podcast #24

A conversation with the journalist Thomas Bell on his latest book, ‘Human Nature’, and the social, cultural and natural history of people’s lives in the Himalayan environment

This episode is now available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Youtube.

📚 This month in Southasian publishing

Notes on grief

In the summer of 2021, India was overwhelmed by the devastating second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Amid this crisis, the author Andaleeb Wajid suffered unimaginable loss. She lost her mother-in-law, and just five days later, her husband – all while she was hospitalised with the virus herself. Wajid finally turned to writing to make sense of it all and to tell the story of her life and her loss. Learning to Make Tea for One (Speaking Tiger, May 2025) is about her life, marriage, motherhood and journey through grief.

The writer and journalist Vidya Krishnan lost her grandmother to old age and her partner to a road accident in one devastating weekend. She reeled from the losses for years, caught between mourning and disbelief – trying to understand the magnitude of what death really means. In White Lilies (Westland, April 2025) Krishnan reflects on what it means to experience grief: not as a fixed, overwhelming presence, but as a shifting process to be tended and lived through. 

Reading Gorkhaland

This Place of Mud and Bone (Penguin India, May 2025) by Sanjay Bista, translated from the Nepali by Anurag Basnet, follows the lives of six schoolmates in a village near Darjeeling as they negotiate the shifting political struggles of the Gorkhaland movement. Even as it explores their individual and intertwined everyday lives, the novel – also a contemporary history of the Darjeeling hills – captures how people live alongside violence.

[Read Anuradha Sharma’s essay from the Himal archives on how a wave of bold new books by home-grown authors have shattered the fearful silence surrounding the 1986 agitation for a separate Gorkha state in India.]

Writer spotlight: Vidyan Ravinthiran

The poet-scholar Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in the north of England to Sri Lankan-Tamil parents. In 2017, he travelled to the north of Sri Lanka – where his parents grew up – to visit the war-torn Tamil areas of the country. In 2020, he, his wife and their one-year-old moved from the United Kingdom to the United States, months before the pandemic hit and the travel ban separated them from family overseas for nearly two years. Avidya (Bloodaxe Books, May 2025) is Ravinthiran’s collection of poems inspired by his journeys and out of a migrant sensibility tied to these three countries. It is also about the forms of strength and fear that parents pass on to their children. 

Also published this year, Ravinthiran’s Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir (W W Norton & Company, January 2025) considers identity in both its political and psychological senses to understand his life through poetry, and vice versa. In this hybrid memoir, he writes both about and through poems, discussing Sri Lanka; the experiences of racism and resilience; intergenerational trauma and more.

Tales from the Northeast

Also out this month, the two-volume anthology Lapbah (Penguin, May 2025) – a title inspired by “Lapbah Sohra”, a term for the heavy monsoon rains in Sohra in the state of Meghalaya – brings together over 50 stories by notable writers from India’s Northeast. Edited by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih and Rimi Nath, the volumes present for the first time voices from all eight states of the region, blending original works in English with translations from regional languages. 

Until next time, happy reading! 

Shwetha Srikanthan
Associate Editor, Himal Southasian

💌 Are there any authors or new books you would like to see featured? Thoughts and suggestions? I would love to hear from you. Please write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com.

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