Love Minus Sex
Ajit Baral
THE ROYAL GHOSTS by Samrat Upadhyay Rupa & Co., 2007, 207 pp., 295
March 2007, volume 31, No 3

Samrat Upadhyay, a Nepali author who went to the US at the age of 21 and who has been living there ever since, first studying and then teaching creative writing at various universities, hit big on the international literary scene with his debut Arresting God in Kathmandu, in 2001. It was probably the first time that a mature, well crafted work of fiction had come out of Nepal. Nepali writing in English started with Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s attempt at English writing in the 1950s. Bal Krishna Sama, Mani Dixit, Kesar Lal, Abhi Subedi, Padma Prasad Devkota, Tek B. Karki, Peter J. Karthak, Prakash A. Raj, D.B. Gurung followed suit. But the bulk of Nepalese’ attempts at English writing was limited to poetry and very little prose fiction was written in Nepal. Mani Dixit was the only one who consistently kept churning out fictions, even if they were of indifferent quality. In 2000, D.B. Gurung published a novel.

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