Stewart: Secret Places

by Manjushree Thapa (Editor)

Prior to Nepal's constitutional reforms in 1990, poets and fiction writers were often jailed and censored for speaking out. Nevertheless, they developed ways to discuss social and political issues in their creative works and to express the lives of Nepal's diverse peoples. Nepali authors in Secret Places include Shailendra Sakar, Majul, Peter J. Karthak, Kesang Tseten, and Manu Brajaki. The volume also contains an informative interview with Mohan Koirala, one of Nepal's most respected poets, and Samrat's essay A Kingdom Orphaned about the effects of the massacre of the royal family on the country and its people.

220 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2001

About the author

Manjushree Thapa is a Nepali writer.
She grew up in Nepal, Canada and the USA. She began to write upon completing her BFA in photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her first book was Mustang Bhot in Fragments (1992). In 2001 she published the novel The Tutor of History, which she had begun as her MFA thesis in the creative writing program at the University of Washington. Her best known book is Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy (2005), published just weeks before the royal coup in Nepal on 1 February 2005. The book was shortlisted for the Lettre Ulysses Award in 2006.[3] After the publication of the book, Thapa left the country to write against the coup. In 2007 she published a short story collection, Tilled Earth. In 2009 she published a biography of a Nepali environmentalist: 'A Boy from Siklis: The Life and Times of Chandra Gurung.' The following year she published a novel, 'Seasons of Flight.' In 2011 she published a nonfiction collection, 'The Lives We Have Lost: Essays and Opinions on Nepal.' She has also written as an op-ed contributor to the New York Times.[4][5]
During the fall and winter of 2011, she was writer-in-residence at Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon.