One year dissolves into the next, but I won’t forget 2013 in a hurry, for this was the year La.Lit came into being. The January launch of our first print volume and website helped us round the corner of our winter of discontent, which ended with the farcical cancellation of the Kathmandu Literary Jatra. But if we couldn’t bring the world to Nepal, we figured, we could take Nepal to the world.

There was very little of Nepal at the 2013 edition of the world’s biggest literary tizzy, January’s Jaipur Literature Festival. One would think we were a nation of illiterates. Still, to make sure the world was aware of our literary evolution, copies of La.Lit were bandied about with gusto. Fortunately, our friends in high places made sure Nepalis were well represented at the SAARC Festival for Literature in March, even if they were awarded less beds than heads. But this was at the cost of missing out on the superlative Kala Sahitya Utsav in Jhapa.

With celebration there was commemoration. Several important writers passed on this year – Chinua Achebe, Doris Lessing, Iain Banks, Elmore Leonard, and Tom Sharpe. We lost poets, too – Nobel winner Seamus Heaney as well as avant-rocker Lou Reed. And if it weren’t for the 2013 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Alice Munro, you might have thought the oft-maligned short story was dead and buried. The grand dame of the short form settled the question just as we released the second volume of La.Lit, an anthology of shorts from Nepal.

Most of these stories drew from the impressive submissions pile for the ‘Writing Nepal’ competition we held over the summer with the help of Samrat Upadhyay. Shertok Samyak, Muna Gurung and Prabhat Gautam, our winners, are ones to watch. It was fitting, then, that we launched Volume 2: New Fiction from Nepal at the Nepal Literature Festival in October, just before a session on the ‘Art of the Short Story’ that I chaired, with writers Prajwal Parajuly and Farah Ghuznavi.

If the short form’s far from shot, then the future looks hot for formats like La.Lit, despite rumours that the venerable Granta is on its knees. Our digital extension allowed us to blog extensively on the Nepal elections as they happened, for instance. But sometimes it’s hard to see the wood for the trees. When our blogger Latokosero visited Seattle, he reported back on a vibrant literary scene, with libraries that provide community space for homeless people and readings in bookshops. But this was also the year that Kathmandu’s legendary Pilgrims Book House burnt down to the ground, sparking laments from across the world. This was an accident, of course, unlike the closing down of a private library in New Delhi. I happened to be in the city when Eloor announced its imminent demise, and rushed over to salvage what I could, emerging guiltily with an armful. It felt like dismembering some neglected part of the community. But what hope for a private library in the modern age, when book-lovers are as consumerist as anyone else? I acquired over three dozen books in 2013, and I can tell you I didn’t read most of them.

So may we divine the future of literature through the eyes of our children? I never had to choose between a tablet and a storybook. But observing the three-year-old children of two siblings on that trip to Delhi, it occurred to me how early our minds are programmed to interact with the world around us. At breakfast, the girl – her mother an academic – demanded a story. The boy – his father a businessman – was wholly absorbed by a videogame. Where does the story go?

On to 2014, then, with an eye on a few local boys. It’s going to be a bumper year: we have a La.Lit contributor (Tom Bell), translator (Aditya Adhikari), editor (Prawin Adhikari) and a couple of friends (Prashant Jha and Manjushree Thapa) coming out with books in the coming months, so keep your eyes peeled for our reviews. And who knows? Perhaps A Suitable Girl will deign to grace us with her presence. To the Muse, then, and the delights of the written word. A very happy new year from all of us LaLiteys!

Rabi Thapa

Editor

La.Lit