The Rain–Maiden and the Bear–Man
- Publisher : Pan Macmillan
- Publishing year : June 2021
- Binding : Hardback
- ISBN : 9780857426185
- Imprint : seagull books
- Age Group : Young Reader
- Language : English
In Easterine kire’s stories, the boundaries between magic and reality drift away, leaving us to Marvel at simple y ...
In Easterine kire’s stories, the boundaries between magic and reality drift away, leaving us to Marvel at simple yet fantastical folktales about human connection. The title story in this collection is about feeling trapped by other people definitions of who we are. The bear-man finds love in the beautiful and compassionate rain-maiden but thinks he would never be good enough for her. He concludes that if he reveals his true feelings she would ridicule him like everyone in his life has always done. He grows gruff and antisocial, believing that he could never find friendship of all, love. The other Stories in this collection represent oral narratives from the people of Nagaland in Northeast India, stories shared privately around a glowing hearth?spirit stories that the narrators swear are true encounters. While “forest song,” “New road,” “river and Earth story,” and “the man who lost his spirit” were narrated to the author by local storytellers, “the man who went to heaven” and “one day” are entirely based on Naga folktales. “The weretigerman,” meanwhile, is woven around the pre-christian Naga tradition of certain men becoming dual-souled with the tiger. In these stories, illustrated in full color by graphic artist sun and in I Banerjee, Kire brings Nagaland come alive with her rich portrayal of both the natural and the spiritual world, which, to the Naga mind, harmoniously coexisted until the recent past.
Easterine Kire is a poet, novelist and writer of short stories and children’s books. She was the first Naga writer to publish an English novel, titled A Naga Village Remembered. Her second novel, A Terrible Matriarchy, has been translated into Norwegian, German and Marathi. In 2011, she was awarded the Governor’s Prize for Excellence in Naga Literature and the Free Word by Catalan PEN, Barcelona in 2013. Her book When the River Sleeps won the 2015 Hindu Literature Prize and was chosen for the inaugural Gordon Graham Prize for Naga Literature in 2019. In 2017, Son of the Thundercloud was awarded the Tata Litlive Book of the Year and the Bal Sahitya Puraskar the following year. Her latest novel, A Respectable Woman, recently won Printed Book of the Year India.
