Ashik Kahina

Ashik Kahina is a writer and translator. He currently divides his time between Chennai and Jaffna.

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Civilians walk past a burnt-out bus in southern Sri Lanka in 1989, during the second JVP insurrection. The shock of the first, in 1971, turned the world of Sri Lankan letters towards the political, and invited the country’s anglophone elite to an unsparing interrogation of themselves as the insurrection’s target. Photo: Robert Nickelsberg

“A glass of blood to drink”: The insurgent poetry of Sri Lanka's Lakdhas Wikkramasinha

05 Jan 2024

Pandiyakannan insisted that one can only write as he does from actual experience with manual scavenging. “When I write,” he said, “I use the same hands that have carried shit.” Illustration by Akila Weerasinghe

“I write with the same hands that carried shit”: Reading Pandiyakannan’s ‘Salavaan’

25 May 2023

Ki Rajanarayanan. Illustration: Nuwan Chamika / Himal Southasian

The storyteller of Kovilpatti

22 Nov 2021

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Himal Southasian

www.himalmag.com