From the outside, the five-story house looked rickety but whole. On the inside, every storey under the corrugated tin roof was divided into two neat parts. One part belonged to Fakir Das Shrestha – an angry old widower – and his only son, Panna.

The feeling started at her knees and radiated upward, traveling through the capillaries and veins that usually carried blood. Today, there was something else mixed in it whose exact chemical composition Sheela could not tell.

When Kathmandu was a lake, there lived a creature here so grotesque even its own mother could not bear to look at it. Its name was Chhepu. Look above the entrance of any temple in Kathmandu and you will see it posing mid-meal.

The Writing Nepal contests have been a treat for the readers in Nepal. Since its first edition, it has attracted emerging writers to submit stories to the competition, and some such writers are emerging writers no more, but established on the firmament of Nepali writing in English.

We are happy to reveal our shortlist for the 2021 edition of Writing Nepal: A Short Story Contest.

On a blustery June afternoon in 1977, Hari Sharan “Kazi” Nepali stood on the Nepali side of the Tibetan plateau with three dead birds in his satchel. The only food he had was tsampa. “Every time I tried to put a fistful into my mouth, the wind blew it all away,” he recalled.

Flowing through the atmosphere
the breaths that my ancestors have taken
are perhaps drifting somewhere
though the interstices of this flower

La.Lit magazine is continuing its partnership with writer Samrat Upadhyay and Indiana University, Bloomington, USA to organize the fifth edition of Writing Nepal: A Short Story Contest. The deadline for submissions to this year’s contest is October 15, 2021.

As the hydra of the pandemic reared its head and cast its loathsome gaze across the world, a national lockdown was put into effect in Nepal, precisely a day before my mother’s 82nd birthday.