Amar Neupane

Amar Neupane is one of the most respected contemporary Nepali novelists, whose work has brought the untold stories of Nepali labour migration to the centre of the literary conversation. He is best known for Seto Dharti ("White Earth"), a sweeping historical novel that follows a young Nepali couple, Madan and Phulmaya, who travel to the brick kilns and coalfields of Shillong and Cherrapunji in colonial India, and for which he won the Madan Puraskar, Nepal's most prestigious literary award, in 2021.

Born in 1965 in the hill district of Sindhupalchok, Neupane began writing when Nepali fiction was still dominated by Kathmandu literary drawing rooms; his novels deliberately set out on the roads and fields of Nepal and its borderlands, giving voice to the peasant, the migrant and the woman left behind. His earlier works Karodaun Kasturi and Waterflower already marked him as a distinctive storyteller, but Seto Dharti, with its painstaking research into period and place, cemented his reputation as a novelist of history and memory. He lives and works in Kathmandu.