Ashanti OMkar is a journalist, poet, presenter, singer and overall media person based in London. Born in Sri Lanka and raised in Nigeria she spent her teens in the UK and later graduated from The University of London. She left behind a flourishing IT career, having worked for the likes of Oracle, Business Objects and Pepsi Cola, for the exciting world of entertainment. To find out more aswell as listen to her new radio show, South Side visit her website http://www.omkari.net.
You shiver, you shudder
Threading on eggshells becomes
Your very existence
Depression grips you
He’s beaten out the talent
Your joie …

Sarfraz Manzoor will be one of the several authors speaking at the Readers and Writers Day to be held at the Birmingham Library Theatre, this month (September 22).
Publishers, Bloomsbury and Faber will be attending the event giving wannabe authors a fantastic opportunity to network with some of the biggest names in the publishing world as well as gain a rare insight into the realities of being a published writer. Liz Jensen, Nadeem Aslam, The Birmingham Poet Laureate, and Daljit Nagra will also be speaking during the day. This is a free event and open …

Two Asian authors have made the shortlist for The Man Booker Prize 2007.
Mohsin Hamid, who spoke to TAWP last month and Indra Sinha are two of the final six authors to have made it on to this year’s shortlist. Following the announcement made on September 7, Howard Davies, Chair of Judges commented:
“Selecting a shortlist this year from what was widely seen as an exciting longlist was a tough challenge. We hope the choices we have made after passionate and careful consideration, will attract wide interest.”
Mohsin Hamid’s second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist traces the life and …

 
Asian writer Azma Dar has been awarded the prize for Fiction in the New Writing Ventures Awards 2007. (September 12)
Her entry, The Secret Arts, is a colourful first chapter of a novel set in Muree, a hill town in Pakistan, where a wedding is about to take place. The story introduces us to a wealth of charming characters, from the middle aged, newly married colonel and his domineering mother, to the old man who practises black magic on the village dwellers.
Predominantly a playwright, Azma entered the competition on a whim, …

It was in the middle of the Great Fudge Recession that Fudgie Fudgerson decided he needed to do something about the fudge crisis that was hampering the government’s efforts to boost the country’s morale. Fudge prices were at an all-time high. They had invaded neighbouring countries for their Weapons of Mass Fudging, only to find their supplies had dwindled too. The government had even attempted to change the national dish from fudge to Jaffa Cake. This was met with indignation and outcries and xenophobic rallies fearing the country had gone …

Leela Soma lives in Scotland where she works as a Principal Teacher in Glasgow. She recently won the Margaret Thompson Davis Trophy for the first 10,00 words of a novel.Her short story Ayah has been published in SQA’s new ‘Write Times’. In 2006 she was short listed in the regional round of the ‘Undiscovered Authors’ competition. She has read a selection of her poems at the recent Edinburgh Fringe Festival- at the Scottish Poetry Library’s Courtyard Readings. Her work reflects her experience as a first generation Indo Scot.
Integrate! Assimilate! 
I have given up my …

Abhijiit Dasgupta is an Indian editor with over twenty five years. He currently works in Kolkata as the editor of India Today. He has recently completed his debut novel The Vice Song.
Anirban always thought he was like a flower. Small, pink, slightly soiled, the sort you see lying unheeded beside some trees in a park or on desolate roads, trampled upon by some indifferent traveller. Or, as later Anirban reasoned, one of those which would have fallen off from a handmade garland without anybody noticing the difference.
When he was a …

 
Mir Mahfuz Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1957. He is a performance artist renowned for his extraordinary voice – a rich throaty whisper brought about by a bullet in the throat, courtesy of a Bangladeshi policeman attempting to silence a singing protest. He is a regular reader at literary festivals and theatres and has successfully completed an Advanced Poetry course at Arvon. Mir Mahfuz lives in South London.
 
Early Morning
Two friends playing with marbles
on the dark smooth ground
under
the soft chin
of a tall shimul tree
long beyond its bloom.
The dust above …

Azma Dar is currently working on her debut novel aswell as a play based on a true story set in WW2, Noor, for which she received an Arts Council grant in 2006. Her first play Chaos, the story of a Muslim family, set in the aftermath of 9/11, was read as one of ten pieces in Kali Theatre’s Shorts Programme in 2003. It was produced by Kali in 2005, opening in Birmingham Rep and going on national tour, before opening at Southwark Playhouse in London. Paper Thin, a play about bogus “passport” …

As the new school term gets underway, TAWP caught up with a writer who’ll be spending most of his year in schools. Bali Rai has a real commitment to get children to read. For Bali, the greatest thing about being a writer is for a young reader to say ‘your book made me want to read more books’. He enjoys the honest feedback from readers he meets during his school visits and indeed, some of the more eccentric ones may find themselves turning up as characters in his next book…
What’s …