South Asian Heritage Month 2026: Stories, Writers, and Reads from SBWN

Happy South Asian Heritage Month! 

Celebrating South Asian writers in our community, revisiting the SBWN archive, and sharing eight recent reads from across the region.  

Every year the month of July is dedicated to celebrate South Asian Heritage, and this time South Asian Heritage Trust have decided on the theme of Unity in Diversity. 

The theme invites us to recognise the histories, experiences and values that connect South Asian communities without treating those communities as interchangeable. South Asia encompasses Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Within and across those countries are hundreds of languages, numerous faiths and an extraordinary variety of regional, cultural and literary traditions. South Asian diasporas have created still more ways of storytelling. 

South Asian voices from the SBWN archive:

South Asian Heritage Month offers an opportunity not only to disco ver new work, but also to return to the stories and reflections South Asian writers have previously shared through SBWN.  Together, these pieces reflect some of the many different experiences contained within the South Asian diaspora. 

We invite you to visit our Archive. 

South Asian Writers within the SBWN team: 

We are grateful to not only serve the South Asian community, but also for how its members have helped build and shape the network itself. Today we are celebrating two members of our team and their contributions to literature in Scotland: 

Alycia Pirmohamed 

SBW Co-Founder and Advisor.

Alycia is a Canadian-born poet based in Scotland. She is the author of the poetry collection Another Way to Split Water. In 2023, she won the Nan Shepherd Prize for her nonfiction debut A Beautiful and Vital Place, forthcoming with Canongate. 

Her other works include pamphlets Hinge and Faces that Fled the Wind, and the collaborative essay Second Memory co-authored with Pratyusha. Alycia is co-organiser of the Ledbury Poetry Critics Program, and teaches on the Creative Writing master’s programme at the University of Cambridge. She has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and is the recipient of several awards, including the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. 

Alycia’s novel, Shorelines, debuts August 13th, and will be the subject of her upcoming book tour with several events this summer. 

Sumayya Usmani 

Foundraising Manager. 

Sumayya  is an award-winning author and writing mentor, born and raised in Pakistan, now living in Glasgow. She is a Scottish Book Trust Next Chapter Awardee (2021) and the award winning author of two cookbooks and one food memoir. Sumayya completed her MLitt in Creative Writing at University of Glasgow with distinction in 2024 and is currently doing a Doctorate of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Her literary interests and thesis is a novel about the culinary legacies and cultural erasure of belonging through colonisation and the Partition of India. Sumayya offers freelance editing and mentors writers and runs an online writer’s membership community called Qissa.

Eight countries, Eight Reads: 

Since no single writer or book can represent the full breadth of South Asian writing, these recommendations are therefore intended as invitations rather than definitive selections: eight possible starting points, chosen from a range of recent releases and genres.

Afghanistan: Outspoken by Sima Samar with Sally Armstrong

Memoir and political history (2024)

In Outspoken: My Fight for Freedom and Human Rights in Afghanistan, physician and human-rights advocate Sima Samar recounts a life spent challenging oppression and fighting for women’s access to healthcare, education and political participation.

Her memoir places these achievements within the realities of war, displacement, persecution and changing political regimes. It is both a personal account and a record of collective struggle, showing how resistance can be built through sustained, practical work even in circumstances designed to make change feel impossible.

Outspoken is a powerful choice for readers interested in memoir, international politics, women’s rights and the relationship between individual courage and community organising.

Content note: this book discusses war, political persecution and human-rights abuses.

Bangladesh: The First Jasmines by Saima Begum

Historical fiction (2025) 

Set during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, The First Jasmines follows sisters Lucky and Jamila as they travel towards Dhaka to see their mother. Their journey is interrupted when they are captured by soldiers and imprisoned in a military camp. Begum places the sisters’ relationship at the centre of the novel, exploring not only brutality and survival but also love, memory, shame and the difficult process of living after violence.

The novel also brings attention to a history that remains unfamiliar to many British readers, despite the large and longstanding Bangladeshi communities across the UK. 

Content note: this novel contains depictions and discussions of war, imprisonment and sexual violence.

Bhutan: The Monk Without Dharma by Thukten Yeshi

Philosophical and adventure fiction (2024)

Bhutanese writer and filmmaker Thukten Yeshi’s debut novel, The Monk Without Dharma, follows a young seeker attempting to understand suffering, karma and his own relationship with Buddhist teachings.

Books by Bhutanese writers can be more difficult to find through mainstream UK publishing and retail networks. Including The Monk Without Dharma therefore also draws attention to how access shapes our reading. necessarily the only, or even the most significant, works being created within a country. Readers may need to search beyond familiar retailers, independent bookshops and library catalogues to encounter writing from smaller publishing markets.

India: Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi

Short stories in translation (2025)

Written by Banu Mushtaq and translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, Heart Lamp brings together twelve stories written across several decades. The collection was awarded the 2025 International Booker Prize, becoming the first collection of short stories to win the award.

Mushtaq writes about women and girls within Muslim communities in southern India, examining the forces that shape their everyday lives. Deepa Bhasthi’s translation also reminds us that reading South Asian literature in English frequently depends upon the creative and interpretive work of translators.

The Maldives: Heal in Paradise by Hawla Riza

Poetry (2025)

The Maldives is frequently presented to international audiences as a luxury holiday destination; in Heal in Paradise, Maldivian poet Hawla Riza writes from within the islands. Her English-language poems explore love, grief, resilience, cultural identity and healing alongside the landscapes of island life. Riza presents the book as a Maldivian “literary souvenir”, offering readers something very different from the commercial images ordinarily associated with the country. The collection also represents the importance of independent and author-led publishing, particularly for writers working in places that are not well served by the largest international publishing industries.

Find out how to order a copy on the author’s website. 

Nepal: The Nepal Cookbook by Rohini Rana

Food writing and cultural history (2024)

A cookbook can be much more than a set of instructions: recipes carry stories.  In The Nepal Cookbook: 108 Regional Recipes, Rohini Rana draws upon research and travels across Nepal to document the country’s varied culinary traditions.

Food writing can provide an especially intimate form of cultural record. Ingredients reveal what grows in a particular climate, while cooking methods can preserve knowledge passed between generations. 

Including a cookbook in this list also expands what we recognise as literature and storytelling. Cultural memory does not live only in novels, poems or formal histories. It can also be found in kitchens, handwritten recipes, and shared meals.

Pakistan: This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin

Literary fiction (2026)

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This Is Where the Serpent Lives moves through interconnected lives and different periods of Pakistani history, from the years following Partition to the present day. These  stories reveal the proximity of extreme privilege and poverty, as well as the compromises people make to survive within unequal structures. The book offers readers a complex social portrait rather than a simple explanation of Pakistan.

Sri Lanka: Her Soul for a Crown by Alysha Rameera

Romantasy (2025)

Drawing inspiration from Sri Lankan history and mythology, Alysha Rameera’s Her Soul for a Crown follows Anula, an orphan, skilled poisoner and royal courtesan who refuses to accept the limits imposed upon her.Determined to claim power within a dangerous kingdom, Anula makes a bargain with Reeri, a formidable Yakka god. Their agreement offers her a possible route to the throne, but the relationship between ambition, desire and divine power soon becomes increasingly complicated.

The novel belongs to the rapidly growing romantasy genre, but its cultural foundations distinguish it from the medieval-European settings that have historically dominated much commercially published fantasy.

Placed beside one another, these books do not produce a single account of South Asian identity… and that is precisely the point. Unity in Diversity asks us to recognise relationships without erasing cultural distinctions. We hope within this list all readers can find at least one title that they are drawn to. 

Most importantly, this reading does not need to end when South Asian Heritage Month does.