KATHMANDU: Former Chancellor of the Nepal Academy Bairagi Kaila will be honored with ‘National Kalashree Felicitation-2075’ for his contribution to Nepali language and literature.

Established by the Nepali Kala Sahitya.com Pratisthan11 years ago, the award is given every year to a person contributing to Nepali language, literature, art and culture and music.

A meeting of the Pratisthan decided to give this year’s award to Kaila, said the Pratisthan’s chairperson Momila Joshi. The award carries a cash prize of Rs 100,000.

KATHMANDU: Former minister and senior writer Modnath Prashit suffered a cardiac arrest on Saturday on his journey to Butwal from Kathmandu.

According to the family, Prashit suffered cardiac arrest near Galchhi, Dhading and was rushed to Katmandu immediately.

He is receiving treatment at the Lalitpur-based Nepal Mediciti Hospital and is said to be out of danger. Doctors attending to the writer said he was shifted to CCU after a blood clot in the heart was removed.

KATHMANDU:  Nepal Academy is going to bring out a peer-reviewed journal. It is going to upgrade ‘Pragya,’ its half-yearly publication into a standard journal.

The attempt is made considering the demand from the intellectual and academic community, according to Dr Gopindra Poudel, chief of the Academy’s Department of Literary Criticism and Essay.

Poudel is the Chief Editor of ‘Pragya’ which has been featuring research-based articles on language, literature, culture, philosophy and social sciences, among various topics.

JANAKPUR: A week-long Art and International Drama Festival-2019 is being organized here in the first week of March.

Organized by Maithili Bikash Kosh, the festival will showcase art works and dramas from countries such as Nepal, India, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan.

Discussions on various themes such as ‘Cultural Identity and Mithila’, ‘Challenges in Preserving Maithili Art and Literature’, ‘Prospects of Maithili films’, ‘Teaching Learning Activities in Maithili language,’ among others will take place during the festival.

Mithila paintings and bamboo crafts will be the other attractions of the festival where poetry recitation will also be held, according to Jivanath Chaudhary, President of the Kosh.

BIRATNAGAR, Feb 24:  Senior litterateur and linguist Prof Bal Krishna Pokharel passed away this morning. He was 85.

Ask any publisher or bookseller, and they’ll tell you,” People aren’t buying novels these days.” It’s not a new phenomenon. Fiction sales have waxed and waned over the decades. When they plummeted over 100 years ago, in 1914, one article in The Times speculated that “the diminutive size of the typical modern apartment, frequent removals, the growing popularity of hotel life, the attractions of golf playing, motoring and ‘the movies’” had all led to decreased sales. The paper decided that publishers needed to bring out fewer titles: “Why do everything in your power to boost a new book, only to crowd it out a week or a month later with one in which you have no more confidence? This is not the method of the makers of biscuits and chewing gums.”

A second 1914 article suggested that the popularity of tango dancing was interfering with reading time; still another blamed good weather. “If they are having a good time in the fresh air, which the advocates of eugenics tell them is better for them than reading books, it is very difficult to get them back to books,” a publisher lamented to The Times.
Publishers today acknowledge that people are reading less fiction, but say that they’re compensating by buying more nonfiction, especially political nonfiction. “If publishers are being honest, they’ve underestimated the appetite for books on or about or peripherally connected to Trump,” says a Knopf executive, Paul Bogaards. “The question is: When will that appetite wane? In terms of fiction, there simply hasn’t been that outlier blockbuster that everyone is talking about.

Does it spell the end of literature? No. It’s simply a pause until the next surprise comes along.”
A recent article in the industry’s leading trade publication, Publishers Weekly, “What’s the Matter With Fiction Sales?,” thought that the problem might be the result of a combination of things, including fewer physical bookstores (since fiction readers like to browse before they buy) and diminished media coverage. In addition, the magazine noted, “Publishers have found breaking out new writers — never mind developing new franchise authors — increasingly difficult.”

(Agencies)

Psychologists are familiar with the idea of perspective taking, knowing some aspect of what another person is thinking. Only recently have they started to investigate the idea of experience-taking: entering the experience of another.
Experience-taking, a term proposed Geoff Kaufman and Lisa Libby (2012), may be thought of as more radical than perspective taking. It’s a kind of merging with another: not just thoughts and beliefs, but a state of being. Empathy is an example in day-to-day life. But yet larger effects, perhaps, occur in fiction when we identify with a literary character. So, although we remain ourselves we can become Anna in Anna Karenina or we can become Elizabeth in Pride and prejudice. Kaufman and Libby say that in experience-taking:
Kaufman and Libby asked student participants to read a story in which the protagonist was a college student. The story gave the reader information about the protagonist’s thoughts, actions, and feelings. The experiments were in two groups. In the first group, the focus was on how far readers thought of themselves as individuals, and the what the effect was of such individual consciousness on experience-taking. In their first experiment, Kaufman and Libby found that the more conscious readers were of their own individual experience, the less was their experience-taking as they read the story. In their second experiment Kaufman and Libby instructed half the readers to think of themselves simply as average students no matter what their background or major, whereas the other half of the readers did not receive this instruction. Those who read the average-student instruction showed more experience-taking when they read the story. In the third experiment readers were asked either to read the story in a cubicle that had a mirror in it, or to read the story in a cubicle without a mirror. Those who didn’t have the mirror had higher scores on experience-taking.
The second group of studies involved manipulating the text of the story. In experiment 4, Kaufman and Libby used four versions of a story: so the participants read the story with either first-person or third-person narration, and with the protagonist being either at the same or a different university than that of the reader. The first-person story induced more experience-taking when the protagonist was at the same university as the reader. In their last two experiments, Kaufman and Libby compared earlier or later placement in the story of information that the protagonist was a member of a group to which the reader did not belong. In experiment 5, readers were heterosexual and the protagonist was homosexual and in experiment 6 readers were white and the protagonist was African-American.
(Agencies)

KATHMANDU: A book penned by senior cardiologist Prof Dr Arun Sayami has been released at a special function organized at the Prime Minister’s official residence, Baluwatar, today.
Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli released the book entitled ‘Mero Jeevan Katha’ (Story of My Life). While releasing the book, PM Oli said the book has incorporated the wonderful acceptance and experience of various ups and down in Dr Sayami’s life. He also suggested Dr Sayami writing a new novel incorporating the issues of treatment, patients, families of the patients and more.
The PM further commented, “Your book is small and lovely. It is a lattice window and has incorporated a few aspects. But the memoir needs to be very serious.” Arguing that writing memoirs needs appropriate time and maturity, PM Oli viewed, “I also can’t write an autobiography, fairly right now, because I need to run the government and the party as well.”
He, however, suggested Dr Sayami to keep on writing, because literary creation is the marvel of expression. On the occasion, Sayami’s colleague, Dr Sashi Sharma observed that Dr Sayami is an able and bold administrator, doctor, professor and inspiring figure. So far, Dr Sayami has brought forth 11 books.

Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian journalist detained for more than five years in Papua New Guinea after seeking asylum in Australia, has won two Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for his debut book, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, even though he’s still not allowed into the country.

Boochani fled from Iran to Indonesia “after his pro-Kurdish publication attracted the scrutiny of Iranian security forces,” according to NPR. In 2013, he was hoping to seek refuge in Australia when his boat was intercepted, and he was detained at Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Australian officials call Manus Island, which is officially closed but has yet to release hundreds of inmates, an “offshore processing center,” but Boochani counters in the title of his book that it’s a prison.

No Friend But the Mountains was written via in Farsi via WhatsApp while Boochani was detained at Manus. The messages were translated into English from Farsi by Omid Tofighian, who accepted the awards on Boochani’s behalf. The book is a combination of poetry, journalism, and critical theory. Since Boochani cannot leave Manus Island, his acceptance speech was delivered at the awards ceremony in a video:

“I have always said I believe in words and literature. I believe that literature has the potential to make change and challenge structures of power,” he said. “Literature has the power to give us freedom.” The detention center at Manus Island has been ruled illegal by Australia’s Supreme Court and by many international aide organizations. In 2018, Doctors Without Borders issued a report revealing dozens of attempted suicides among the hundreds of people being held there. Manus Island has been officially closed, but those who have been held there since 2013 are still awaiting release.

No Friend But the Mountains won the Victorian Premier Prize in two categories, both the highest award, the Victorian Prize for Literature, and in the nonfiction category. The honors come with $125k in Australian dollars, or about $90k U.S. “We all hope that finally, after five years, we get freedom in a place like America or other countries,” Boochani told. Agencies

Sir Quentin Blake has revealed a series of drawings that reimagine Roald Dahl’s beloved character Matilda as an adult, 30 years after the book was published. The children’s illustrator depicts Matilda Wormwood in five new images; as a poet laureate, an astrophysicist, a special FX artist, a “world traveller”, and CEO of the British Library.

In his foreword to the new editions, Blake, 85, revealed he had enjoyed imagining what Matilda might be up to now she has grown up. “Since, as a small child, Matilda was gifted in several ways, it wasn’t very difficult,” he wrote. “I imagined that for each version of our grown-up Matilda one of her extraordinary talents would have come to the fore and shown her a role in real life.”

He continued: “I am sure that someone who had read so many books when she was small could easily have become chief executive of the British library, or someone exceptionally gifted at mental arithmetic would be perfectly at home in astrophysics. And if you have been to so many countries in books, what could be more natural than to go and see them yourself?”

BBC News unveiled the illustration of Matilda as poet laureate, “widely celebrated for her moving performance of The Trunchbull Saga”, as part of the anniversary celebrations on 1 October. The Roald Dahl Story Company had asked the British public what Matilda’s life would be like now, from her work to who she would be friends with in real life.
Suggestions for her friends included Emma Watson, Ed Sheeran, and the Duchess of Sussex. Half of those surveyed also said Matilda would still be friends with Lavender, her fictional best friend in the original story. Matilda has sold 17 million copies since it was first published. A popular film adaptation starring Danny DeVito was released in 1996, with Mara Wilson appearing as the eponymous hero. Agencies