FARAH AHAMED, runner-up in the 2018 Feature Writing Competition, explores the shifting nature of political and historical events in short stories by R.K. Narayan and Ivan Vladislavic: ‘Every society feels it has evolved a greater understanding of a truth and seeks to entrench this belief, forgetting that in time new realisations will lead to a new dismantling, discarding and repositioning to find a hard-won balance that will also prove temporary…’
SHAFIQAH SAMARASAM looks at the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories of Jhumpa Lahiri: ‘Her magnificent stories will echo in the lives of many foreign people because of the strength of her portrayal of their lives…’
DAVID FRANKEL finds unsettling qualities in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Mrs Bathurst’: ‘Written in 1904, ‘Mrs Bathurst’ is a story that doesn’t fit readily with a modern reader’s expectations of Rudyard Kipling. There is no imperialism or the fairy tale charm of The Jungle Book. Instead, it is filled with unease and an air of melancholy that set it apart from all but a very few of his other stories…’
SOUMYA BHATTACHARYA asks: As a practising writer, what, really, are the pleasures and perils of writing? And in what way and to what extent, in the exercise of writing, the practice of it, does the writer’s self come into play?
