By Prema Viswanathan
Savia Viegas has always collected stories. They came to her in the lamplit rooms of her Goan childhood, in the voices of women talking late into the night, in village gossip, family histories and the small dramas that rarely find their way into official histories. For years she put them into fiction. Now she is stitching them into cloth.
By Jane Borges
It all began when Mai started remembering. On loop. Repeating snatches from her memory none of us had ever heard about. Hers was a small life, lived between different chawls in South Bombay. The tiny rooms she inhabited with her husband and children was a space of survival, crammed with people, spare furniture and objects. The proximity was suffocating. More so the routine.
By Selma Carvalho
Lindsay Pereira’s fourth book is titled Super (Harper Collins, 2026), a pun on the word which the protagonist Sukhpreet Gill is fond of using to express appreciation but is also a job commonly undertaken by immigrants in North America, that of superintendent or maintenance man of a block of flats, the popular contraction being “super.”
By Selma Carvalho
Here amidst the well-preserved wooden boxes and files was almost a Pompeiian preservation of how Goans lived in Zanzibar, the quarrels they had, the estates they left behind, their obituaries, registration of contracts, and most significantly their quasi-political role within the Portuguese consulate of Zanzibar. Here they existed not as someone else’s perception of them but as blood and bone, kith and kin.
By Selma Carvalho
The tragedy of human societies is that we are only capable of accessing recent memory to form opinion. This tragedy is further compounded in an era when just about anybody can spread lies and videotape. Anyone with basic knowledge of software or AI can make reels on history they’ve discovered through memes, and then spread the virus of untruths, imagined oppressions and constant majoritarian victimhood to thousands of followers, multiplying in its duplicity.
By Sheela Jaywant
With the first rains, we tie nylon ropes to the fixed hooks in the small passage in my flat which leads from the kitchen to the toilet. Up near the ceiling, lengthwise, so that we can hang clothes above the sink and washing machine, outside the bathroom door. We have separate toilet and bathroom; that way, family members can simultaneously hurry with different personal chores while hastening to work in the morning.
By S. M. Visakh
It is raining incessantly. Children, some holding umbrellas, some in raincoats, and some even drenched, are on their way to schools. This is one of the timeless moments of monsoons in Keralam. The South-West monsoon, also called edavappathy in Malayalam, arrives in Keralam usually on the first week of June when schools reopen.
By Fátima da Silva Gracias
I love the rains in Goa, my home state in the West Coast of India. They are beautiful — for me, the best season of the year, even though sometimes the heavy downpours and flooding interrupt daily routines and create chaos all around. It is a time for reflection — a season to pause and complete the things left pending during the rest of the rushed year.
By Selma Carvalho
Humour is notoriously difficult to render, isn’t it? So, it really is nice to hear that it works in the book. Indeed, I wanted there to be an obvious satirical element in the story and the suitors provide the perfect opportunity to demonstrate some real and very wild things one has heard of, or seen, in society. While I wanted readers to have a laugh at these figures (and maybe at themselves), I also hoped to point out the ludicrousness of what the characters subject themselves and others to. This is why the second half of the book brings back some of the occurrences from the first half, but in less funny ways.
By R. Benedito Ferrao
The illustrated book The Story of Janakye Bai (Goa 1556, 2026) chronicles a tale that has been passed down over several generations amongst Velip people, one of Goa’s Indigenous communities. The story revolves around Janakye Bai, a girl who chooses to run away from home rather than resign herself to a fate she refuses to accept. This book appears in two editions, one in Velip Konkani and the other in English. Vithai Zaraunker, a member of the Velip community and an Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at the D. D. Kosambi School of Social Sciences and Behavioural Studies at Goa University, envisioned this book project…
By Ava Sherry
I had been drawn to R. Benedito Ferrão and Vamona Navelcar’s The Destination is the Journey, initially because it wasn’t obvious in its positioning. It felt almost like a puzzle, except with every answer found, another layer of depth revealed itself. The Destination is The Journey forms part of R. Benedito Ferrão’s edited book, Goa/Portugal/Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar (2017) which is about a Goan artist – Navelcar (1929-2021) – whose life and identity, due to colonial forces, became dispersed across the boundaries of Africa, Asia, and Europe.
By Saachi D’ Souza
Growing up in the dominantly Hindu state of Gujarat, Christmas was more than gifts, family, and cheer. We found ways, albeit small, to bring us back to what was forced into suppression. Like most Catholic kids, I too took piano lessons. The one song that stuck with me was Auld Lang Syne. Every year, between the last carol and the first toast, the familiar melody begins. It isn’t, strictly speaking, a Christmas song. There is no Bethlehem, no manger, no snow. But Auld Lang Syne always arrives, as if called by the hush that settles over the world in late December.
By Michelle Mendonça Bambawale
The PGI was the centre for community activities. We learnt to play badminton and there. We looked forward to the PGI’s long event calendar over Christmas. We did not notice the rundown buildings or the peeling paint. The toilets still haunt me, they were filthy and stinky. As young kids, the highlight was the annual Christmas tree party. We always had fashionable new custom-made dresses to wear. There were needle and thread, lime and spoon and sack races. The highlight was waiting for Santa Claus to give us our Christmas presents.
By Selma Carvalho
Poet and playwright Owen Sheers thinks landscape is what happens to nature when humans arrive. We create landscape, otherwise nature exists, forlorn, desultory and on its own. In every manner the newly released anthology The Brave New World of Goan Writing & Art 2025, edited by me and published by Cinnamon Teal, encapsulates this ethos of Goans interacting with the land of Goa. Identity is that most unknowable thing, constantly changing, a mere shadow on the edges of our consciousness, and yet if something were to exist as Goan identity than that something is our love of the land.
By R. Benedito Ferrão
Once an Assistant State Librarian at Goa’s Krishnadas Shama State Central Library, Maria de Lourdes Bravo da Costa also served as a Reference Librarian whose specialty was Indo-Portuguese History. Accordingly, the focus of da Costa’s latest book comes as no surprise, its title being Portuguese Colonialism, Food, and Society in Goa: 1900-1961 (Bloomsbury, 2025). Attending to the final decades of Portuguese rule in Goa, da Costa’s book looks closely at rice production in the capital of Estado da Índia.
By R. Benedito Ferrão
Paul Melo e Castro talks about the translations Life Stories: The Collected Stories of Maria Elsa da Rocha (Goa 1556, 2023), Weeds in the Red Dust: The Collected Stories of Epitácio Pais (CinnamonTeal, 2023), and Regional Tales (CinnamonTeal, 2024) which brings together stories by Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues.
By Jessica Faleiro
Your first book Shadow of the Palm Tree (2019) brought to light the presence of the slave trade the Portuguese brought to Goa. Your second book when god died (2023) brings to light the Goa Inquisition, another significant historical event in Goa that isn’t talked about very much. What was the motivation or inspiration for choosing to portray this particular moment of history in your latest novel?
By Heta Pandit
Why do we call it a book release, Rochelle? In fact, isn’t it just the reverse of release? Holding, reading, and experiencing a book is an inhalation, a holding in of your breath, a waiting for a revelation. That is exactly how I felt when I began reading Coins in Rivers. I wonder why the perpetrators of all the atrocities described against women are men. You write as a feminist; you see and understand scars. Even the ones under the skin. And yet, I see a soft gentle touch, not the caustic, harsh, and scarred perspective of a hard-core man-hater.
