The Winning Story: Himal Short Story Competition 2019

The editors at Himal Southasian are delighted to announce the winner of our end-of-year short story competition:

'Milk' by Mashiul Alam, translated from Bangla into English by Shabnam Nadiya.

The editors were in complete agreement about our admiration for the story and its elegant translation. The story took us on a journey of the imagination, a world unto itself. It is a story with so much of life in it ­– humans, animals, open fields; a social, a natural and a supernatural world – and yet with an eye for minute details and an arresting turn of phrase. We marvelled that the story is so lucidly told and the translation so seamless and beautiful in its retelling. Here, we felt, is a story being told to us, that could be spoken or written, that held us in its thrall and led us beyond ourselves.