Rokeya Lita

Rokeya Lita is a Bangladeshi novelist and journalist.

Eaducation and early life

Lita obtained her B.Sc. and first master's degree from the University of Dhaka. She received her second master's degree from the University of Liberal Arts of Bangladesh. She then worked for the fortnightly magazine Anondo Alo by Impress Telefilm Publications. She worked in Tarunkontho by The Daily Ittefak, banglanews24.com and Independent Television for a long time. Moreover, she worked in the Bangladesh Sanglap project of BBC. She writes columns regularly in different English and Bengali newspapers.

Career

Lita's first novel is Shomokameeta (Homosexuality), which was published in the Ekushey Book Fair in 2015. Her first novel was very controversial, since the theme of the novel is a kind of taboo in a Muslim populated country like Bangladesh.^[1] The writer received a lot of threats from people of different groups. Her second novel Dumurer Phul (The Unseen Object) is published in 2016. In her second novel, the writer depicts the socio-political lives of indigenous people of different groups of the Chittagong Hill Tracts.^[2] Though the political vulnerability of this area made some indigenous people protest against the writings of the novelist,^[3] the writer has been successfully able to bring out some unknown facts regarding traditional indigenous laws, their flaws and impacts on the indigenous women.^[4] Currently, she is working on several projects, which include a novel on the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971.

References