December 24 had always been one of the most awaited days of the year for us. The grand birthday cake for Jesus' birthday, the roasted sausages and meatloaves, and finally, a house-favourite, narrating the story of the Three Wise Men–that is how I had spent Christmas Eve for as long as I could remember.

Be it for their nostalgic pull or the promise of escaping into a rich, evocative world, these tales have been consistent go-to’s for me over the years.

Luna strode then to the river’s bank, her loose-fitting blouse and petticoat flapping in the breeze that had speedily arrived. Her nupur, fashioned from mollusk shells, sounded in the wind like wind chimes, and more so when she moved.

Even the Bangladeshi protagonist—merely referred to as Agontok (a stranger)—is established as an anti-hero, in contrast with the traditionally heroic Hercules, which I thought was an exciting change.

I smoked and we stared. We stared and I smoked. One cigarette after another. To this day I’m not certain how the next two hours had passed, but I will never forget the blank look in its eyes and something that resembled a sneer that I never saw on Liton Mia’s face before.

The chilliness of the room was unpleasant since I had woken up.

The 11 short stories encompass a number of ideas, mainly the binary oppositions of the human psyche, all covering the inner conflicts of human life. 

“What Men Live By” opens like a children’s story—the way Matilda or most Roald Dahl books would start out—with simple, everyday events and straightforward descriptions. Eventually, though, one line caught my attention and I couldn’t help but smile:

A long time ago, when I was a young writer who had just published his first collection of short stories and had just been married to a young and lovely woman, I wrote a love story in the first person, which created two unanticipated problems.

Besides the brilliantly unconventional addition of an Intelligence Agent as the main audience, the story’s language, unflinchingly charged with a humorous tone, is enough to keep a reader’s eyes glued to the screen.

Free to enter and open to any citizen, aged 18 and over, of a Commonwealth country, the prize accepts short story entries written in English and translated to English, as well as stories written in Bangla, Chinese, French, Greek, Kiswahili, Malay, Portuguese, Samoan, Tamil and Turkish languages. 

Zahir uses crows as a symbol of magic realism, as found in local folklore, where animals serve as omens of luck both good and bad. The crows seem to bring bad luck to the couple, and wherever they go, the birds follow.

I didn’t know the endings to most of the stories as I fell asleep halfway.

They will consider me nothing but a body that has stopped functioning after my death.

Journalist and author Mashiul Alam has been selected as a resident of the 2022 Iowa International Writing Program (IWP), among the world’s most prestigious creative writing residencies.

Too much education gets into these girls’ heads.

Zaman has classified the pieces in two groups: "the early stories focus on the events that took place on 21 February—the processions, the police action and the deaths—while the later ones show how the attitude to Bangla has changed in these 70 years.

For me, the key takeaway from “Lucky” would be the perspective one can gain into living in the shadow of war, which creates around its victims a prison of undying misery.

"But that's not McDonald's. It's MacDonwald's. Must be a knock-off."

An engaging discussion on translations unfolded at the event.