Narayan Wagle

Narayan Wagle is one of Nepal's most influential journalists and a celebrated novelist, best known for his debut novel Palpasa Café (2005), a lyrical portrait of love, art and the country's decade-long civil war that became a defining work of modern Nepali fiction and was later adapted into a feature film. As a founder of Kantipur Publications, he helped build independent, audience-led journalism in Nepal following the restoration of democracy in the 1990s, and has served as editor-in-chief of the Kantipur daily.

His fiction repeatedly returns to the themes that shaped his reporting life — the cost of conflict, the fragility of hope, and ordinary people caught between ideals and survival. Wagle went on to publish the ambitious, multi-voice novel Mayur Times, and remains one of the few writers to have serialized a novel in the very newspaper he edited. Palpasa Café continues to sit on every serious Nepali reading list, praised for giving the Nepali novel a new, modern register of prose.