Sadie Kaye — Excerpt: Rifaz’s startling gift as a writer is to make the heaviest of emotions feel miraculously airborne without sacrificing their weight. The result is a poignant, beautifully crafted narrative that elevates and uplifts.
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Under the Same Moon: Seeing Ourselves in Vibha Batra’s Spotless
Wani Nazir — Excerpt: Spotless isn’t about pain. It’s a coming-of-age story, a journal, and a cosmic poem all at once. The narrator’s voice is sharp, self-aware, and funny when you least expect it. You can taste it and feel the muck.
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Translating Melancholy — Sabika Abbas Naqvi’s Rendition of Rahman Abbas’s Rohzin, or The Melancholy of the Soul
Wani Nazir — Excerpt: Naqvi’s translation doesn’t merely change Abbas’s prose into English; it also brings back the depth of Rohzin’s pain, its remarkable beauty, and its intellectual complexity.
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Chronicling a Vanishing World Between Living and Loving — Bhagirath Mishra’s Charanbhumi: Echoes from the Grazing Lands
Ritam Dutta — Excerpt: The novel’s prose, as rendered in English by Manikuntala Dasgupta, carries the scent of its soil. Her translation has a rare transparency—it does not attempt to embellish but allows the natural music of the original to flow through.
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A Haven at the Roof of the World — Review of Anuradha Roy’s Called by the Hills: A Home in the Himalaya
Anjana Basu — Excerpt: Unlike Ruskin Bond, Roy’s love of the hills is not unqualified. She sees the monsoons as a season of stoicism — life in the hills, in fact, despite the wild beauty all around demands a certain acceptance from all those who live there.