Manjushree Thapa was born in 1968 in Kathmandu to former Foreign Minister and Nepal Rastra Bank governor
Bhekh Bahadur Thapa and public health expert Dr. Rita Thapa. She grew up in
Nepal, Canada and in United States. She began to write upon completing her BFA in photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her first
book was
Mustang Bhot in Fragments (1992). In 2001 she published the novel
The Tutor of History, which she had begun as her MFA thesis in the creative writing program at the University of Washington in Seattle, which she attended as a Fulbright scholar. Her best known book is
Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy (2005), published just weeks before the royal coup in Nepal on 1 February 2005. The book was shortlisted for the
Lettre Ulysses Award in 2006. After the publication of the book, Thapa left the country to live in Canada. In 2007, she published a short story collection,
Tilled Earth. In 2009 she published a biography of a Nepali environmentalist,
A Boy from Siklis: The Life and Times of Chandra Gurung. The following year, she published a novel,
Seasons of Flight. In 2011, she published a nonfiction collection,
The Lives We Have Lost: Essays and Opinions on Nepal. Her latest book, published in South Asia in 2016, is a novel,
All Of Us in Our Own Lives. She has also contributed op-eds to the
New York Times. Her translation of
Indra Bahadur Rai's ''There's a Carnival Today'' was conducted under the 2017
PEN America Heim Translation Grant. ==Bibliography==