Watch this print space for the Talespeople's weekly reflections on creative writing.
Part memoir, part magical realism, this is a story about identity and the idea of home.
The characters crackle with life, quirky and contradictory, despicable and sympathetic in turns.
Pictures are really the most basic form of story-telling, aren’t they? I imagine our ancestors sat around fires doing shadow theatre. They painted on cave walls long before writing came along.
If there is one thing that worries me a little, it is that the strong trend for themes of sexual violence that began to appear during lockdown, continues to be favoured by a significant number of our domestic writers.
It’s hard to believe, but we only moved out of the sandbox provided by Litmosphere (thanks Rubaiya and Ramisa Chowdhury) two years ago, and shifted Sehri Tales © to an independent platform in 2020! We hope you’ve been enjoying the stories so far.
I channelled my hurt, anger and frustration into poetry and flash fiction that had nothing to do with my agitator and her cronies.
This year, most of the frequently asked questions pertain to the selection process behind the stories chosen for our Star Youth collaboration. I hope the following explainer answers most of them.
We promised to go big for our fifth year, but we haven't even begun to unveil our big plans, before being overwhelmed by the sheer response from our participants.
Life in Dhaka provides a thousand reasons to feel hopeless and frustrated. Still, we can find hope amongst it all.
Last year, we got to see some stellar writing and some incredible art. What was more inspiring than the quality of work produced during the holy month, was the community that was formed in the process.
With the moon up and celebrations already underway in a few countries, it’s a wrap for Sehri Tales 2021.
A frequently-asked question during this year’s Sehri Tales was ‘why the 250-word limit?’ My knee-jerk reaction has been to want to snap ‘Do you also ask why a limerick has to be five lines, or a haiku three?” Since anger never solved anything, I figured a more level-headed explanation was necessary.
We just crossed the ten-day mark for Ramadan this past week, and the 1000 posts for this year’s Sehri Tales challenge. I don’t know if the thrill of crossing these milestones ever wears off – it certainly hasn’t for me.
I created Sehri Tales in 2016 as a coping mechanism for some melancholia I was experiencing at the time. I knew that the exercise was calming and centering for me, but I didn’t quite think about writing’s potential to heal until I partnered up with the online readers’ community Litmosphere, in 2018.
Some experts say that the “superpower” that puts us humans – weak, slow, and lacking any physical advantages over the natural world – at the apex of