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Literary Review
BOOKWATCH
Voices from across the border
ANITA JOSHUA
Voices and Visions: Young Writers from Pakistan, edited by Norman Ohler and Amra Raza, Oxford University Press, Rs. 100.
Here is a collection of short stories from Pakistan by a young crop of women writers who are not burdened by the need to impress the reader with their command over English. No use of bombastic language or words that require a dictionary. Simply told,
these are stories that women in India can easily relate to; dealing as they do with the tentativeness of falling in love for the first time in the sub-continental context, dowry, status of the girl within the family….
Not that proof was ever needed on how similar Indians and Pakistanis are in their behaviour, but given the status of relations between the two countries, additional evidence will never hurt. And, this collection provides it; that, too, from Generation Next.
This collection was planned to mark three milestones: the 60th Independence Day of Pakistan, the 90th birth anniversary of German writer Heinrich Boll and the 50th anniversary of the Goethe-Institut in Karachi. The “constellation of anniversaries” got the Goethe-Institut and Heinrich Boll Foundation in Lahore to launch a German-Pakistani commemorative project which included a young writers competition and a writers’ workshop.
The competition attracted 600 entries — both short stories and poems — and the 20 who made it to the collection got to participate in the workshop. While the workshop was designed to hone their writing skills, the 20 young authors decided to take it a step forward and launch their own literary platform christened “Bol” (speak).
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