Amitav Ghosh and new writing from India and Pakistan

The Cultural Frontline

Multi-award-winning Indian author Amitav Ghosh on using verse and folklore in his new book, Jungle Nama, to tell a cautionary tale about our relationship with the natural world.

Pakistani writers, Awais Khan from Lahore and Saba Karim Khan from Karachi, discuss the challenges in getting their English language stories in front of readers in their own country, and the influence of their foreign audience.

Amna Mufti in Lahore is an author and award-winning television script writer in Urdu. She tells us how that affects the way she writes stories and their content – and who can and cannot read them.

And Assamese author Aruni Kashyap on the vast audiences for Indian literature in the country’s indigenous languages and the centrality of farmers and farming when stories are not being written in English.

Presenter: Nawal Al-Maghafi Producer: Paul Waters

(Photo: Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. Credit: Barbara Zanon/Getty Images)