Greta Rana MBE (awarded Order of the British Empire in 2005) was born in Yorkshire, UK and moved to Nepal with her husband Madhukar SJB Rana in 1971. She first ventured into literary fiction in the 1970s after two short genre novels, Nothing Greener and Distant Hills – and a popular cliff-hanger written for a weekly newspaper titled Against the Winds of Tomorrow. Her work in mountain areas was to provide the themes for her novels as she observed a country left behind, finding transition difficult against the ethnic and cultural divides and the suffering caused by the desperation of poverty in one of the harshest terrains on earth. She has written seven novels and seven poetry collections; her last published novel was Hostage (2018). In 1991, her short story, ‘The Hill’ won The Arnsberger Internationale Kurzprosa. Greta Rana is also a founder member of PEN Nepal and a former Chair of International PEN Women Writers’ Committee. Greta Rana has been living in Nepal for about five decades – and on 31 December 2004, she retired from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) where she helped establish a publishing and outreach division 24 years ago. Greta Rana’s committed interest in children’s education, especially children whose families cannot afford to send them to school, led to the founding of the ‘New Shakespeare Wallahs,’ an amateur drama group working under the auspices of the Nepal-Britain Society to raise resources for children’s education amongst the poorest communities. Brief periods of residence in Laos and Afghanistan in the late 1970s and early ’80s, besides her time in Nepal, have given her a unique outlook on what the author refers to as ‘the colonisation by development aid.’ Her upcoming novel ‘Ghosts in the Bamboo’ is broadly plotted around these locales. She is a full-time writer and lives with her children in Jawalakhel, Lalitpur, Kathmandu.
