Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala

Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala (1914–1982), universally known as B.P. Koirala, was Nepal's first elected Prime Minister and one of the country's most consequential statesmen — but he was also a novelist and short-story writer whose fiction reshaped Nepali prose. His best-known novel Sumnima explores the meeting of a young Brahmin priest and a Kiranti woman in the ancient hills, rendering the collision of faith, desire and two civilisations with rare psychological sympathy.

As a young lawyer and independence-era activist, Koirala brought distinctly modern, existential themes into Nepali letters, and wrote the acclaimed novel Teen Ghumti alongside his political career. He spent long years in prison after the royal coup that ended his fifteen-month government in 1960, yet continued writing, and in his final years helped negotiate the return of multiparty democracy. Nepalis remember him both as a hero of the democratic movement and as an author of uncommon honesty about the workings of the individual heart.