Manjushree Thapa is the author of fiction and literary nonfiction books inspired by her country of origin, Nepal. She also translates Nepali literature into English.
Her book on the massacre of the royal family and the Maoist insurgency in Nepal, Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy, was a finalist for the Lettre Ulysses Prize in 2006. In 2008 she won the Canada Council for the Arts’ annual Joseph S Stauffer Prize in Literature. She has received several other recognitions, including a PEN/Heim grant for literary translation and a Fulbright fellowship.
Her writing has appeared in New York Times, London Review of Books, Globe and Mail, Foreign Affairs, and Newsweek. She has served in juries for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Award for Nonfiction and the True Story Award. Her books have been translated into French, German, Finnish, Italian, and Japanese.
She has a BFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master’s in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Washington in Seattle.
Manjushree Thapa has given public talks on a variety of subjects throughout her career, including on:
- Politically engaged literature (Jaipur Literature Festival, PEN Hong Kong, Duke University, National University of Singapore)
- Identity, rights, and writing (University of Wisconsin, Portland State University, National Cathedral School)
- The movement for democracy in Nepal (University of California Long Beach, Stiftung Gartenflugel, University of Washington, University of Toronto)
- Literary translation (The New School, Canadian Writers’ Summit)
Having witnessed important political and civil rights movements in Nepal, Manjushree Thapa is centrally concerned with the freedom of each individual to survive, respond to, and steer collective experience.
Buddhist philosophy informs her current thinking.
She believes that imaginative work is more urgent than ever as the old methods of framing society along progressive, liberal, and conservative political lines fail before a fractured commons.
Her passion as a writer is to recognize the dynamic, ever-changing nature of both the individual and the collective so as to reimagine the world anew.
To book Manjushree Thapa, contact Rob Firing at speakers@transatlanticagency.com.