Shuhan Rizwan and Tanzim Rahman on the weight of the word, the pressure of the Boi Mela, and the stories we are still too afraid to tell.
One approaches the page with the steady hand of an observer; the other, with the restless imagination of a myth-maker. Shuhan Rizwan and Tanzim Rahman may share the same city, but they inhabit different versions of it. Reading them together is like witnessing a bridge being built from two different shores. Shuhan Rizwan writes with a grounded, structural precision, his work often serving as a necessary reckoning with the ghosts of history. Whether he is dissecting political legacies or urban decay, his prose has the weight of something built to last. Tanzim Rahman, meanwhile, looks toward the horizon. As a master of the uncanny, he uses the tools of genre fiction to ask high-stakes questions about identity and belief. While Rizwan unearths the foundations of what we have become, Rahman sketches the blueprints for what we might fear, or hope to be.
When they sit together, the conversation inevitably turns to the language they share, more specifically, how they choose to break it.
“I feel a certain sense of protectiveness these days that wasn’t there when I first started writing.” Rizwan says, “I think it has grown stronger in recent years.” For him, the increasing encroachment of English words in Bangla prose signals a worrying dilution of the mother tongue. The problem, he believes, stems from an intellectual laziness. He points to a growing habit where writers swap out perfectly good Bangla words for English ones simply because they don’t know — or haven’t bothered to learn — their own language well enough. “It can feel a bit murky,” he admits, “hard to justify.”
Tanzim Rahman, who cut his teeth translating, views the struggle differently. “It’s about context and intentionality,” he counters. He recalls a childhood spent immersed in Bangla science fiction, where terms like “blasters” or “warp drives” felt like natural, unquestioned fixtures of those universes. Decades later, when he sat down to write a sci-fi novel of his own, he challenged the necessity of those English placeholders. He asked himself why it wasn’t possible to describe a world far in the future using only Bangla, and found that it was. He describes the thrill of planting a flag by writing a science fiction novel entirely in Bangla, proving the language is well-armed for the future. Yet, he is a pragmatist. If he is writing a modern-day Dhaka banker, he lets the English slip in. “It’s more reasonable to pepper the prose with the terms those characters actually use,” he says.
This sense of intentionality dictates not just the words they choose, but the very rhythm of their creative lives. For Shuhan Rizwan, the fair is a social space, a vibrant and loud hangout where the work is already done. “I’m done with most of my manuscripts by the middle of the year,” he says, seemingly immune to the panic of February.
Rahman laughs at the discipline. “I do feel the pressure!” For him, the months leading up to the fair are a scramble of publisher demands and late-night edits. His memories of the Boimela are rooted in the nostalgia of the Sheba Prokashoni and Unmad stalls, where he and his mother, who is an avid reader, would spend their Fridays. He recalls returning home with stacks of twenty books that cost a mere five hundred taka. He views the modern Boimela as a different beast — messier than the one he loved as a child, but still a mandatory pilgrimage.
While the Boimela remains a mandatory pilgrimage for any professional writer, the light-heartedness fades when the conversation turns to the professional risks of the trade. Reading couldn’t not be political, if it tried. Rizwan sees the fair as a map not just of what is present, but of what is missing; he views the gaps in the stalls as a silent reckoning with the stories a culture is still too afraid to tell. This is not just an abstract concern, but a lived reality of social upbringing and a quiet understanding that certain truths carry too much risk to be bound in ink.
Tanzim Rahman offers a sharp, modern example. In 2024, a publisher who had spent a year chasing him for a manuscript suddenly baulked at a science fiction proposal. The reason? A balanced critique of organised religion. “The publisher turned it down citing the country’s sensitivity,” he shares, a reminder that even in the realm of the fantasy, the walls of reality are high.
But how people approach reading now isn’t the same as before either. Shuhan Rizwan notes that the act has become more communal, a point Rahman agrees with. “If you don’t like Anna Karenina for example, you can receive comments or notes from an online community of readers and find new inspiration to pick the book back up.”
Yet, the physical reality of the city remains a primary muse. The noise, the traffic, and the rising concrete create the urban cacophony that Rizwan tries to capture in the vein of Pamuk. While he’s also written books that are less focused on this particular aspect, he shares that “but the city, its vernacular, my place in it; all of this informs my writing to some extent.” Tanzim Rahman, however, is the seeker. “My wife seeks out beautiful natural panoramas,” he says with a grin, “and I seek the spices and the fragrance of the city.” For him, Dhaka isn’t just a setting; it is a myth in the making, and genre fiction is the only tool sharp enough to carve it out.