So excited to announce this! Available only in India for now.

"But in a world which is full of categories, hatred and ideologies, there was this basic decency. There was something beautiful about the two people." ~ Basharat Peer on Homebound www.rediff.com/movies/repor...

"The aim of translation, especially in former colonies like ours where English is acquired along with a complicated baggage, should never be to write in “proper” English [but] to introduce the reader to new words that come loaded with the hum of another language." scroll.in/article/1081...

“This is not just my victory, but a chorus of voices often left unheard. A thousand fireflies lighting a single sky, brief, brilliant and utterly collective.” ~ Banu Mushtaq in her acceptance speech. #InternationalBooker2025 #internationalbooker

The @financialtimes.com editorial board on the west's shameful silence on Gaza. (Proud to be a small part of this paper.)

Breaking news: Tensions between the two countries have been rising since last month when New Delhi blamed Islamabad for an attack by militants in Indian-administered Kashmir that killed 26 people. www.ft.com/content/c03e...

Note the reference in the Pulitzer designation to her "fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years"

Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha wins Pulitzer prize for commentary

"I have just won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Let it bring hope Let it be a tale." ~ Mosab Abu Toha, Palestinian poet and Pulitzer winner: www.ndtv.com/world-news/l...

Percival Everett: "That is the first thing fascists do—go after books and art—because that is where we are most human. And it is not writing that I consider so wonderfully subversive. It is actually reading, the most subversive thing we can do. " news.ucsc.edu/2025/04/a-de... #writing

Ocean Vuong, in an interview that cracks open so much, so beautifully. "The syllabus was Baldwin, Annie Dillard, Foucault. And I realized #writing was not writing a respectable email to get a job. It was a medium of understanding suffering. That’s when it changed." www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/m...

Small notes: Tim Berners-Lee in 1999: "Inventing the WWW involved my growing realisation that there was a power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained, weblike way.The Web arose as the answer to an open challenge, through the swirling together of influences, ideas, & realisations from many sides."

Small notes: how easily AI Overview is fooled by fake proverbs ("the crow and the scarecrow are no friends", "the deepest well holds the sweetest water" and other nonsense). It provides such plausible back-formations and stories. You wonder how long the Web as we know it will remain truthful.

"We are facing a global crisis," says the artist and graphic novelist Badiucao. "The outcome is either autocratic empires dividing the world or World War III." A generation of dissidents and exiles turn to the graphic novel/ memoir — my column for the @financialtimes.com. archive.is/6fxlR

If this ain't a goddamn perfect eulogy, I don't know what is.

I have tariffed the penguins that are on Heard Island and which you were probably assuming did not export goods forgive me they were taking advantage of us so cunning and so cold

And some people Write poems every day of their lives But not on the page, not on the screen… Lost and Found by @nilanjanaroy.bsky.social (read by @zigzackly.bsky.social ) youtu.be/s3kTfnNDADM?...

Watching One Hundred Years of Solitude, spooling the episodes out slowly so as to let the memory of the book return. Many years ago, GGM set conditions for film-makers: the entire book must be filmed, but only one chapter, two minutes long, was to be released each year, for one hundred years.

Persons of the Year — two whose courage and integrity under extreme loss and horror stood out to me: Gisèle Pélicot, who spoke for so many when she said that "shame must change sides". And Wael al-Dahdouh: "They took revenge on us through our children." www.theguardian.com/world/2024/o...

🧽 Squeaky Clean by @callummcsorley.bsky.social and ⚫️ Black River by @nilanjanaroy.bsky.social BOTH @thetimes.com Best Paperbacks of 2024! www.thetimes.com/culture/book...

lovely piece on the threat AI poses to book translation, which doubles as an ode to translators: www.ft.com/content/3dff...

The good news keeps rolling in! BLACK RIVER by @nilanjanaroy.bsky.social is one of Crime Reads Best Crime Novels of 2024! crimereads.com/the-best-cri...

When @parodevi.bsky.social writes about chilli cheese toast, best of hot gooey messes. "The sharp chilli bites your tongue, the plump salty cheese caresses it, and so it can go on infinitely, a sweet lick of tomato sauce keeping the excitement fresh." www.mid-day.com/news/opinion...

Erik Pedersen and I chat about books, reading and crime fiction. For the OC Register and other papers: www.dailynews.com/2024/12/06/b...

Non-fiction by Indian women writers: Urvashi Butalia, Ghazala Wahab, Neha Dixit and I have a few suggestions. In Namita Bhandare's column: www.hindustantimes.com/opinion/abso...

Sharp insights from @rahulabhatia.bsky.social. "By not naming that group, the receiver of the communication was left to take that last step of making the connection. That gives the suggestion of power because making a connection is a proactive act; it comes from you."

I hope the Assad regime’s millions of victims find justice, and a divided world can get its act together to help Syrians in what’s certain to be a tough and risky transition 🇸🇾 🇸🇾 🇸🇾

A headline for the ages 🇸🇾 🇸🇾 🇸🇾 Syrian rebels seize Damascus and topple Assad dynasty on.ft.com/49oa91X

In 12 days I’ll be 71. This was the year I had the courage to publish my novel. It was a strange process, the fiction world, but made easier by @saltpublishing.com who’ve been fantastic. I’m lucky to have had some amazing reviews, ❤️ to everyone who read it and said encouraging things

A photo I posted of graffiti in Syria in 2014. "One day the war will be over and I will return to my poem" I hope they will return to their poem

A Bluesky starter pack of major news outlets that have joined the platform, including CNN, The Guardian, Reuters, NPR, Financial Times, WSJ, Wired, and USA Today. [bsky.app]

As "The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community" begins to appear on shop-fronts in India, here's what Rachel Dwyer, professor emeritus at SOAS University (who taught Gujarati, besides other subjects) said, after she read the book :-)

Love it when something human breaks through the algorithm. "Sunny and beautiful."

"What I hear again and again is a deep longing to be in right relation with the natural world — and the willingness to act on it." www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/b...

In January, Israeli historian Lee Mordechai released a 124 page report with 1,400 footnotes detailing evidence of Israel’s genocide, which he continues to update. How many of you heard about it? witnessing-the-gaza-war.com/wp-content/u...

"PEN International documented the cases of 13 writers and poets who have been killed between October and December 2023, marking it as the deadliest conflict for writers in recent history." www.pen-international.org/war-on-write...

Includes Arundhati Roy, Bisan from Gaza, Gisèle Pelicot, Sally Rooney and other idols. The @financialtimes.com's 25 most influential women of 2024 — free to read.

The human relationship with writing is so strong, and hard to measure in numbers. The National Mission for Manuscripts estimates that India has ten million manuscripts. That doesn't include lost, destroyed, uncollected manuscripts. All those minds from the past, placing their faith in writing.

Between the earthquake/tsuanmi scare, the UnitedHealthcare shooting and the South Korea martial law stuff this week, it feels like Bluesky is getting more and more critical mass around breaking events that made Twitter so sticky and useful.

A year ago, on this day, the IDF targetted and killed Refaat Alareer. A little later, I recorded this poem he wrote which the world knows now. [In the recording, I say it was written on 14th October, 2023, but I later found that he had written it many years ago.]

Everyone should be sharing this story about the Amnesty International report because yes many of us have long acknowledged that it’s a genocide but there are still people who need the validation of a report from an org like Amnesty to believe it’s true zeteo.com/p/amnesty-co...

Back to typing with a cat batting at my hands. (Second one is lying across the keyboard. This should be fun... for them, if not your humble writer, and is an accurate answer to the question: "Why haven't you finished the next book?")

Meanwhile, the AQI in Delhi is a delightful 194 — a mere 120 in some parts of the megacity. It's strange how swiftly your definition of "breathable air" changes after exposure to 999+ levels. It's still toxic soup, but clear soup. How little we ask of our politicians in India.

Much of my unease about AI comes from being old enough to remember the first stirrings of the Internet. It went from anarchy to group hug central to Ankh-Morpork to a Big Four corporate playground, but it had an organic evolution. Today's AI was born as a product. Marketed, ubiquitous, inescapable.

Brian Eno on the limits of AI: "I’m intrigued and bored at the same time: I find it quickly becomes quite tedious. I have a sort of inner dissatisfaction when I play with it, a little like the feeling I get from eating a lot of confectionery when I’m hungry." www.bostonreview.net/forum_respon...

Powerful acceptance speech by Amitav Ghosh: "It is important to note that violence was not incidental to the geopolitical ascendancy of Western empires; it was central to it." erasmusprijs.org/en/laureates...

You're back! 😍 Congratulations.

Salvador Dali, pattachitra style, by Bhaskar Chitrakar

I wrote this story about the migration to Bluesky, what it means and what it tells us about oligarchdom, state actor propaganda, big tech and whether you're the user or the product. Tell me what you think. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-fun...

Perhaps the biggest shift, aside from a sense of greater safety: the Bird Site became all about likes, followers, clout. Blue Sky feels like it prioritises community, and has conversations baked into the DNA. All credit to the Blue Sky team, who've coped graciously with millions of us newishbies.