When this opportunity to visit Belgium came along, I couldn’t think of a better adventure than to make this ‘pilgrimage’ to Geel. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t enter the church since it was closed for the winter because what I came to see was on the outside – the bas-relief depicting the beheading of Dymphna. Wouldn’t it have been more apt if Damon was holding the chopped-off head of Dymphna? Just saying…
She looked at him, frozen. Everything stopped. There was only this moment when his hand slid down her neck, shoulders, chest, gently and tenderly followed her contours, wrapped her waist and pulled her close. Her body flared under the movement of his hand. She felt his lips, their butterfly touch.
A haunting cry from the heart of oppression. María A. Perdomo’s powerful poem captures the anguish of a generation robbed of dreams, education, and hope. “You stole my youth” resonates with anyone who’s watched corruption destroy lives whilst those in power live in luxury.
Charu Nivedita is a South Indian Author. He has published six works of fiction, six works on cinema and numerous non-fiction. His novel Zero Degree was long listed for the 2013 edition of Jan Michalski Prize for Literature. It is a lipogrammatic novel in Tamil.
Olvens Louissaint is a Caribbean bilingual writer, Translator and Human rights defender. As an aspiring writer who used to address complex issues strategically and confidently through his work and whose work treats both personal and universal subjects, he is mainly committed to standing for the well-being of humanity and awarded with many international accolades.
When she faced one of the original Sunflowers paintings, back in that distant summer, at that same museum, she had felt a surge of inexplicable tender joy, mixed with sadness. It had a pale yellow background and it was a copy of one of the first four versions that Van Gogh had painted in the summer of 1888 in Arles.
We sit in the bus recalling how ten years ago, we had to abandon South Sudan to seek calm in Sudan. Here we are again, on the road back to South Sudan, fleeing death. Now we are in a bus bound for safety, but perhaps to the jaws of old death waiting.
There is such a clichéd romance in the idea of being an artist’s model. All these women who made it to eternity by posing for the greats. In reality, there was nothing romantic about it. It was tedious and demanding. The body begins to ache from the effort to keep still. The face stiffens from the attempt to preserve the same expression.
I sat in the graveyard, merging effortlessly in the background. When you have crossed your seventies, and you have mastered the art of sitting quietly without taking much interest in your surroundings, letting the hours slip away, it is easier to overlook you. In my case, I was worried the occasional visitor to the graveyard might think I was one of the inhabitants, taking a stroll to free their legs, cramped from lying in the grave for too long!
This is not about teaching her how to walk. This is about cheering her to run in life’s race. Failure isn’t an option, neither for me nor for her, because her accomplishments ultimately become my progress report. Consequently, just like the vast majority of the Singaporean parent population, I interfere unapologetically in my child’s education.
Lily Tang believes that storytelling has the power to transcend cultures and build the critical connections we need to make the world a better place and has spent the past two years building a youth storytelling fellowship program to empower Indigenous students in Taiwan. Through her writing, Lily explores the transnational Chinese experience and the complexity, beauty, and pain of immigration and diasporic identity.
Pulau Pulau was a matchmaking initiative created for writers by writers to find a writing partner. The aim of the project was finding a writing partner to co-write something together that goes beyond what either could create on their own. It was organised by the archipelago collective, a transnational community of writers and artists. From across the world approx. 80+ writers have participated from 30+ different countries whose are generally writes in 50+ different languages.
The future belongs to those who can integrate the digital fluency of Generation Z with the deep reading capacities of previous generations. In that integration lies our best hope for citizens capable of both technological innovation and ethical wisdom—the combination our unstable world most desperately needs.
In Delhi, there lived a critic- his name was Venkat Swaminathan. I was in touch with him from the time I first moved to Delhi in 1978 until 1982. In 1979, he sublet a room in his house to me. Generally, I don’t ask anyone the usual ‘Indian’ questions, such as, where they work, if they are married, how many kids they have, or whether they own or rent their house.
‘Brussels, Naked’ is an experimental novel in the form of twelve interconnected novellas, each named after municipalities or neighbourhoods in Brussels, and each with a different narrator. It covers a period of fifteen years and is built around three main arcs: the life of Iris, Brussels itself as a protagonist and the EU crises, captured in the stories of ordinary people.
An aspiring writer who used to address complex issues strategically and confidently through my work, Olvens Louissaint is mainly committed to standing for the well-being of humanity and awarded with many international accolades. Some of his poems appeared in many international Anthologies and Magazines and his short stories and essays are also published in several journals
I was forty years old then. I had requested a transfer from Delhi to Chennai. Delhi, being the capital, it was easy to ask to be transferred to another city from there. Initially, I didn’t want to relocate to Chennai, but due to some unavoidable circumstances, I had to make the move.
It is a romanced attempt by a twenty-first-century Western European to read into the mind of a 16th-century Indian monarch
The Asian Group of Literature is pleased to announce the launch of The Aisan Prize for Poetry’s inaugural edition. The Asian Prize for Poetry is a non-monitory award that aims to create a global platform of appreciation for the outstanding work of poetry by writers around the world.
I dream of lakes again. Not lakes, but of a specific lake. Roopkund Lake. Strange to dream in such vivid details about a place one has never visited. This time, my buddh dadda, my Hari, also makes an appearance. I have not thought of my paternal great-grandfather for ages.
The Asian Review 