Author: Zafar Anjum

Coming soon from Kitaab: The Librarian by Kavitha Rao

“The Librarian” is a dark, powerful novel that will appeal to everybody who has ever loved a book, or found happiness in a library.

Kitaab Singapore is pleased to announce its upcoming fiction title, The Librarian by Indian author Kavitha Rao. This is her first work of fiction.

The novel is slated to be launched at the Singapore Writers Festival 2017 in November.

Synopsis of the novel

“That was the beginning of my great love affair with the Macmillan, and my journey through the tangled, knotty forest of literature, with Shekhar, that most kindly and yet intimidating of guides.”

Ever since she could read, Vidya Patel realised that she preferred books to humans. Her family disapproves, but Vidya meanders through life with her nose in a book. When she is ten, she visits the Macmillan, a struggling heritage library in Mumbai. It is in the Macmillan that Vidya truly, finally, feels whole.

Vidya befriends Shekhar Raghavan, the brilliant, eccentric librarian, who becomes her mentor. As soon as she is old enough, she joins the library as a junior librarian, and throws herself into keeping the Macmillan going, with consequences she could never have foreseen. She also learns the destructive power of obsession, and what it does to people. Will Vidya be able to save the Macmillan? And at what cost?

“The Librarian” is a dark, powerful novel that will appeal to everybody who has ever loved a book, or found happiness in a library.

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Kitaab, Singapore Publishes Literary Selfies edited by Professor A R Kidwai and Dr Sherin Sherwani

An edited volume of articles entitled Literary Selfies: Self Identity in Indian Muslim English Fiction edited by Professor A R Kidwai, Director, UGC Human Resource Development Centre of Aligarh Muslim University and Dr Sherin Sherwani has been published by the reputed Singapore based Kitaab Publishers.

This collection of critical essays on Indian English Writing by Muslim authors published since 1940s is a study of Muslim identity across changing times. As perceived by authors such as Ahmed Ali, Shama Futehally, Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz and Attia Hussain, the volume explores their depiction of Indian Muslim life in their times.

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Kitaab welcomes its new editor Sucharita Dutta-Asane

Team Kitaab welcomes Sucharita Dutta-Asane as its new editor. She is the second independent editor to be helming Kitaab, a Singapore-based online publication.

Sucharita, who is an independent editor and award-winning writer based in Pune, joined Team Kitaab on Friday (15 Sep). She took over the mantle of Kitaab’s editorship after the previous editor Amina Sheikh moved on.

“Kitaab has a specific vision – to be a singular site for Asian writing,” said Sucharita, on joining Kitaab. “Given the easily accepted westward tilt of our literary sensitivities, it is heartening to have a site like Kitaab that facilitates the move closer home. This is immensely exciting and I’m grateful to Zafar Anjum for giving me this opportunity to explore and celebrate Asian writing through its various facets, iterations and manifestations.”

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Victims of genocide or victims of history: 10 facts you did not know about the Rohingya crisis and the roasting of Aung Sang Suu Kyi


A profoundly ignorant chorus of denunciation has descended upon Aung Sang Suu Kyi over the treatment of the Rohingyas — while ignoring the historical baggage of colonial policies that created this tragic conundrum. And critics ignore the role of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), which mounted coordinated attacks on police stations, army posts and civilian targets in November 2016 and August 2017. Here are some facts for your to consider:

1. It all goes back to the 1932 election in Burma (then part of British India); the Brits wanted to separate Burmese from India, and propped up the Separatist League, but the Anti-Separatists (led by Ba Maw) won. They wanted to remain loosely federated with India. Nonetheless Burma was separated from India in 1935. When Ba Maw won the next election too in 1937, the British policies of Divide and Rule were stepped up — and led to anti-Indian rioting in 1938 in Rangoon (after the Brits imprisoned Ba Maw for seeking Japanese support for his campaign of full independence from the Brits).

2. When Japan liberated Burma in March 1942, Ba Maw was restored to power (formally becoming Prime Minister or Adipati in August 1943), with Aung San as his DPM and Defence minister. The British had ensured that the British Burma Army contained no Burmese (instead comprising Karen, Kachins, Shans and Chins) while the bureaucracy contained mainly Anglo-Burmans and Indians. The majority Bamars only got opportunities in the military and bureaucracy in alliance with the Japanese. 

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Mohsin Hamid among those shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

American heavyweights Paul Auster and George Saunders are to go head to head for this year’s Man Booker prize, as major names from fiction fall by the wayside for two new faces on the 2017 shortlist.

The prize judges, chaired by Baroness Lola Young, announced their shortlist of six titles on Wednesday morning. Alongside Auster and Saunders, the 29-year-old British debut novelist Fiona Mozley has secured a place in the final line-up, as did American first timer Emily Fridlund.

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Bridging the Gap to Early Japanese Literature: Translator Peter MacMillan

If you had to pick one book to introduce Japanese culture, what would you choose? For the translator and poet Peter MacMillan, it would be the thirteenth-century anthology Hyakunin isshu, which he rendered in English as One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each. “These hundred short poems tell us almost everything we need to know about the Japanese,” he said in a talk at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo on July 26, 2017.

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Salman Rushdie Plays the Trump Card

Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie

In the pantheon of literature, the best novels manage to feel timeless even as they capture a snapshot of history, from Jane Austen examining Regency-era social mores in Pride and Prejudice to John Steinbeck depicting the Great Depression in The Grapes of Wrath. But writing about the present is a delicate balance — include too many gadgets, apps and cultural reference points and your story quickly feels irrelevant.

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Call for submissions for an upcoming anthology in English of new and emerging poets

This is a call for submissions for an upcoming anthology in English of new and emerging poets (translations are welcome) to be published by Kitaab (Singapore).

The anthology, to be edited by Manik Sharma and Semeen Ali, contemplates India, 70 years since Independence, and in doing so seeks to construct a poetic map of the country. The map here refers to an idea distinctly different from the one we are used to, and feel divided by. The editors would like to clarify that this is not a symbolic, patriotic work. It merely places India in the hands of its third generation, more so as a quantity to enquire, than merely adapt to. We want to create a map, a map distinctly Indian (through smells, flavours, textures, colours etc. and not necessarily their geographies. Or, for example, identity may flow from – memories, objects, journeys, emotions, etc). No language, or culture, supersedes the other, even if majorities do. To the core of the idea here, the value of the author and his or her subject is equal.

We want to look at works that discover/re-imagine these tropes, poems that may tell us something we do not know, or something we do but consider too passé for poetry. Things that are quintessentially Indian, told through the personal or the social, through its people or the poems some of them, as part of this anthology may now write.

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