The Meat Market
by Shaheen Akhtar and Mashiul Alam
translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya
23pp, paper
Toad Press, 2019. $5.00
cover art by Liton Sarkar
You can purchase a copy of The Meat Market here.
Shaheen Akhtar is the author of five novels and four short story collections. In 2004, her novel Talaash won the Prothom Alo Book of the Year award. The English translation of Talaash (The Search, trans. Ella Dutta) was published by Zubaan in New Delhi in 2011. Akhtar was presented with the Sera Bangali 2014 award in the field of literature by India’s leading Bengali news channel ABP Ananda. She received the Akhteruzzaman Elias Katha Shahitya Puroshkar for her novel Moyur Shinghason and the Bangla Academy Shahitya Puroshkar for fiction. Her work has been translated into English, German and Korean.
Mashiul Alam was born in northern Bangladesh in 1966. He graduated in journalism from the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in Moscow in 1993. He works at Prothom Alo, the leading Bengali daily in Bangladesh. He is the author of a dozen books including Second Night with Tanushree (a novel), Ghora Masud (a novella), Mangsher Karbar (The Meat Market, short stories), and Pakistan (short stories). His short story “An Indian Citizen in Our Town” (trans. Shabnam Nadiya) was published in Words Without Borders’ 2013 Bangladesh feature.
Shabnam Nadiya is a Bangladeshi writer and translator in California. She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2012. Her translation of Moinul Ahsan Saber’s novel The Mercenary was published in 2018 (US edition), and Shaheen Akhtar’s Beloved Rongomala is forthcoming, both from Seagull Books. She has published her own work and translations in journals such as Joyland, Gulf Coast, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Wasafiri, Five Chapters, Bengal Lights, and The Missing Slate, as well as various anthologies. She is the recipient of the 2019-2020 Steinbeck Fellowship.