Manjushree Thapa
Manjushree Thapa was born in Kathmandu, Nepal, in 1968. She was educated in Nepal, Canada and the United States, after which she returned to Nepal and began to write. Her first book was Mustang Bhot in Fragments (Himal Books, 1992) a travelogue to Mustang, along Nepal's border with Tibet. In 2001 she published the novel The Tutor of History.
Her next book, the non-fiction Forget Kathmandu: an Elegy for Democracy (Viking Penguin: 2005, 2006) was a personal meditation on Nepal’s troubled search for democracy. Written as the country succumbed to a brutal Maoist insurgency and an even more brutal military counterinsurgency, the book was released a month before the February 2005 military coup by King Gyanendra. It instantly became a coveted primer, selling under the table while the country was under strict censorship. Thapa was forced to flee the country and to live in exile. Forget Kathmandu was a finalist in the 2006 Lettre Ulysses award for literary reportage.
Now she is back in Kathmandu. Manjushree’s next book is a collection of short stories, Tilled Earth (released by Penguin India: 2007), containing stories written over the course of a decade. She is currently working on a novel.
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