Helter Skelter is a proud partner of the Desperate Literature Prize for Short Fiction. This story by Jan Carson was one of the final shortlisted entries for the prize in 2021. Sean says it isn’t safe, swimming alone. “No one will notice if you’re drowning,” he says. “If
Imagine losing weight with no effort. Your cheekbones drop their fleshy curtains, raising your face to the beauty standards you have been made to internalise. Collar bones pierce their way out of your skin, beckoning beautiful pendants to come nest in between. Your stomach sucks in of its own accord,
As a young girl, my grandmother loved to swim. She was born in what was then East Pakistan, in Barisal, where her family still lives. Even now her voice and laugh are a wheeze. They fill the room. She is a large woman, with a loud voice often on the
The Anger of Saintly Men, the first work of fiction by award-winning author and filmmaker Anubha Yadav, calls out toxic masculinity within the Indian family and society at large through its nuanced and unafraid take on what it means to be a “man” in India. Narrated linearly through the lives
Language and culture, through literature, film, theatre, and music, embody ideas and thoughts that shape how we perceive ourselves--- as individuals, a community, and in relation to the rest of the world. Art thereby grows into much more than just a form of creativity; it becomes a form of resistance
Speaking as someone who is often in a tussle with her own thoughts, No Straight Thing Was Ever Made verbalised some of my most profound feelings of anxiety and the helplessness and frustration that come with it. Urvashi Bahuguna’s tightly packed collection of ten essays navigates with nuance living,
The sounds that make up the title of Prateek Vats’s Eeb Allay Ooo! resonate through its length. Their most direct expression is in the deep, full-bodied croaks and high-pitched whoops of its monkey-repelling squad, assigned in New Delhi’s Raisina Hill to scare the animals away from the country’
Along With the Sun: Stories from Tamil Nadu's Black Soil Region is an anthology of 20 stories originally published in the 1980s. The brainchild of Ki. Rajanarayanan or ‘Ki. Ra’ to the writers' collective that blooms under his shade, the anthology is composed of twenty such Tamil
Sonia Filinto’s documentary Bread and Belonging explores the connections between bread in Goa, known locally as pão, and the people who make it. It kneads together themes of identity, migration, nostalgia and resilience, presenting them through three parallel stories about bread. In the first, Alzira and her family, multigenerational
Rohena Gera’s Is Love Enough? Sir opens with Ratna (Tillotama Shome) in her village home packing her bags to leave for the city to which she has been unexpectedly called back. We see her making her way to Mumbai, navigating the long road back on scooters, buses and trains,