Literature

Conquest, colonisation, governance and politics are central to The Odyssey. The capture of households, women, slaves, mass killings and destruction make Homer’s epic a horrific tale of human hubris

Chinese delivery worker Wang Jibing’s Lu Xun Literary Prize win reaffirms literature’s capacity to celebrate authentic voices and imagination, regardless of where they emerge

Han Kang, Karen Hao and Arundhati Roy were honoured at the National Book Critics Circle Awards. Frances FitzGerald received lifetime achievement, while NPR and PBS were also recognised

If all lifeforms have sentience and emotion, then the chance to flourish cannot belong to humans alone

Humanity often describes extreme violence perpetrated by humans upon each other as ‘animal rage’ or ‘animal acts’, creating a false distinction between human and animal

As it turns 20, Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ echoes Shelley: Are we not responsible for the clones, the creatures we design with the will to serve humans?

Before nominating APJ Abdul Kalam as India’s 11th President, BJP suggested Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who declined, citing democratic precedent. Vajpayee built consensus across parties, maintained a strong bond with Lal Krishna Advani, and handled crises like the 2001 Parliament attack

Merriam Webster named “slop” its 2025 word of the year, reflecting the surge of low quality AI generated content online. The term highlights growing public awareness of fake digital material and a desire for authenticity amid rapid advances in artificial intelligence

Congress highlighted historian Sugata Bose’s remark that Tagore advised singing only the first part of “Vande Mataram” in 1937 to preserve communal harmony, countering PM Modi’s accusations against Nehru. The debate reignited political sparring over history, nationalism, and alleged appeasement politics

‘Vibe coding,’ coined by AI expert Andrej Karpathy to describe creating software through natural language, was named Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2025. The term highlights AI’s accessibility and impact, alongside trending words like glaze, aura farming, and biohacking

Dalit literature faces a new threat — biased algorithms, poor digitisation, and academic neglect are pushing this powerful movement rooted in resistance and equality to the margins again

As Nobel laureate Toni Morrison said: We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal

John Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’, published 380 years ago, was one of the first defences of free speech and quest for truth — its arguments remain valid even today

Humans find robot sadness compelling because its intelligence makes it sad, just as intelligence makes us sad too

Hungary’s 1,000-year-old Pannonhalma Archabbey is battling a severe beetle infestation threatening its historic library. Restoration teams are removing and disinfecting 100,000 books to preserve centuries-old manuscripts, with climate change believed to have worsened the infestation risk

We read Mein Kampf in its hundredth anniversary year with the wisdom of hindsight but also horror-struck at the Israeli state’s own actions now, fully aware of the nightmare reality Hitler’s vision spread across 700 pages produced

There may be no poetry in the pits but poetry can bring up what lies below: fear, greed, devastation

Despite being a celebrated author, Frederick Forsyth, who died at 86, always considered himself a journalist first and often joked that he turned to fiction only when he found himself broke and jobless

The saas-bahu dynamic has been a source of amusement, annoyance and, of course, inspiration, especially in the Indian subcontinent

The International Booker Prize’s practice of sharing credit and prize money equally between author and translator is commendable, especially when translators are ignored in publishing rights, award credits, book reviews, and promotions

Muddupalani, an 18th century Telugu poet and Devadasi, composed Radhika Santvanamu, a bold and emotionally resonant work that remains one of India’s most significant, yet largely forgotten, contributions to women’s literature

Banu Mushtaq’s ‘Heart Lamp’, winning the 2025 International Booker Prize — the first ever for a Kannada work, marks the triumph of the power of vernacular literature over systemic biases

The other five books on the shortlist included ‘On the Calculation of Volume I' by Solvej Balle, ‘Small Boat' by Vincent Delecroix, ‘Under the Eye of the Big Bird' by Hiromi Kawakami, ‘Perfection' by Vincenzo Latronico, and ‘A Leopard-Skin Hat' by Anne Serre

The period of Sir Salar Jung I from 1853 to 1883, a watershed moment in the history of Hyderabad State, saw the feudal princely State metamorphosed into a progressive, forward-looking administrative unit