Anamol Mani
Anamol Mani (Paudel), also written as Anmolmani in Nepali, is a Nepali Canadian fiction writer, poet, essayist, and journalist based in Edmonton, Alberta. His writing moves across fiction, poetry, ghazals, journalism, and literary commentary, and is marked by an unusual combination of emotional directness, social observation, experimental subject matter, and attention to scientific development, migration, love, war, and social change. He literary work developed through print culture, radio, journalism, and literary gatherings in Nepal and later extended into diasporic writing in Canada.
Anamol Mani was born in 1981 in Chatiwan Andheri, a remote village in Nepal’s Makwanpur district. He was raised by the single mother after his parents separated before his birth. He attended Karmaprapti Primary School in his maternal uncle’s village, and his literary beginnings go back to childhood. In fourth grade, he wrote a poem about Dashain, the major Nepali festival. During secondary school, his literary interests broadened. He read poetry, ghazals, and children’s stories, and actively took part in school literary programs. His writings began to appear in literary magazines, and some were broadcast on Radio Nepal, Nepal’s national radio service. A major turning point came in ninth grade, when a library was established in his village. There he encountered major works of Nepali literature, including Diamond Shumsher Rana’s novels Seto Bagh (The White Tiger) and Basanti, the story collection Sajha Katha (Collected Stories), Guru Prasad Mainali’s stories, and Laxmi Nibandha Sangraha (Laxmi Essay Collection). He was also affected by finding a half-torn book by Shankar Lamichhane in the library and by listening to the literary radio programs of Nawaraj Lamsal.
His confidence as a writer grew when his first poem was published in Pragyapan Hawai Patrika, an airmail literary magazine circulated in postal-letter form . Publication gave him the reassurance that writing could move outward and reach readers. A deeper initiation into Nepali literature came through two key figures: Ramesh Mohan Adhikari, a dedicated Nepali teacher; and Ghanshyam Neupane “Parishrami,” known for his ghazal writing. Under their encouragement, he began publishing another airmail magazine, Jharana Hawai Patrika, while still a student. He also came into touch with poets such as Madhav Ghimire, Nirmohi Vyas, and Shyamdas Vaishnav. He also began sending poems to national magazines and newspapers, including Muna, Rangamancha, Asmita, Yuva, Navayuva, and Gorkhapatra. By high school, he was already participating in radio programs, writing plays, earning payment for published pieces, and composing ghazals extempore at public events.
These literary beginnings unfolded alongside severe personal hardship. Anamol Mani lost his mother when he was in sixth grade, yet continued his education under difficult conditions. He lived with a member of the village development committee and did household labour in exchange for room and board. A book called Thulo Nepali Varnamala (The Big Nepali Alphabet), a book used for teaching the alphabet and writing, encouraged him to practice better handwriting, and he also became known for drafting love letters for friends. Such writing cultivated emotional excess, sentimentalism, and stylized sincerity. This skill in sentimental address and epistolary language later entered his fiction. In the story “Test Tube Choro ra Meri Premika” (“Test-Tube Son and My Beloved”), for instance, the sentimental language of the letter recalls the letter-writing culture he learned in his school years.
After finishing grade ten in 1997, he moved to Kathmandu. The early years in the capital were harsh. He struggled to find affordable accommodation and money for daily survival. For three nights he stayed in the city’s Swoyambhunath area, dependent on the kindness of a shopkeeper. To finance his education, he collected used bottles for an Ayurvedic medicine maker. He maintained his literary ties by meeting Keshari Amgain, who sold books on the street. Reading one of Amgain’s short novels encouraged him, while separately he nurtured the ambition of publishing ghazals in weekly magazines. During the same period, he also practiced karate and earned a black belt. His article “Paisa Uthauna Hidda” (“ While Going to Collect Money”), published in Kantipur, reflects on experiences connected to karate. He also worked as a newspaper hawker, selling Samacharpatra and earning one rupee per copy. Amid this struggle, his poems began appearing in the weekly magazine Divya Darshan.
He pursued higher education at Tribhuvan University, studying journalism at Ratna Rajyalakshmi Campus, Education at Mahendra Ratna Campus, and sociology at Patan Multiple Campus. He later became known as a journalist, especially for investigative reporting on education. Alongside reporting, he also held editorial roles in several weekly and monthly periodicals. While studying journalism, he gathered and wrote news, contributed book reviews, and continued producing literary work. He worked for Khabarpatrika, a newspaper that paid him better, until it closed after the coup of 2002 in Nepal. He then moved to another newspaper, Samacharpatra, and later to Himal magazine and then served as the Kathmandu Valley bureau chief for Kantipur Daily, a major national outlet. Around this period, his publications included poems like “Karagar Pathau Condomlai” (“Send the Condom to Prison”) and “Test Tube Choro ra Meri Premika” (“Test-Tube Son and My Beloved”). He worked on the latter poem and wrote a short story with the same title and published in Garima. Through these years, he participated in events organized by Sahitya Sandhya and Bhaktapur Sahitya Samaj, both important literary forums. Even as his responsibilities grew, he made time each day to visit the Indian Library in Kathmandu, where he read magazines, stories, and ghazals. There he read Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth in both Nepali and English and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in Hindi. He also read Hindi poetry by writers such as Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena and Ashok Vajpeyi. His later literary influences included Nepali writers Daulat Bikram Bista, Bhavani Bhikshu, Laxmi Prasad Devkota, Shankar Lamichhane, Vijay Malla, Parijat, Indra Bahadur Rai, and Bhupi Sherchan. . He has especially acknowledged the impact of Shankar Lamichhane and Mohanraj Sharma on his storytelling style. Among foreign writers, he admires Anton Chekhov, Saadat Hasan Manto, Gabriel García Márquez, and Maxim Gorky.
His first short story collection, Neelima ra Gaadha Andhyaro (Neelima and Pitch Dark), published in 2009, became widely noticed in Nepal. The collection’s stories are notable for their unusual subjects and their engagement with science, technology, emotion, and modern social anxieties. The title story turns on cloning. Padam, a poet whose beloved has disappeared, encounters someone physically identical to her, yet she has no memory of him. The story builds its tension through dialogue and through the conceptual disorientation created by sameness without recognition. Critic Govinda Raj Bhattarai praised the story’s language and style. Another story, “Akaaran” (“Without Cause”), explores the limits of science in understanding emotional pain. A boy suffers from what appears to be an incurable condition; the doctors cannot explain it, and the story gradually suggests that the pain is in fact tied to intimate emotional hurt rather than to a straightforward medical condition. The tear of the beloved becomes more meaningful than the clinical diagnosis, and the boy dies leaving doctors bewildered. These stories ask whether science can account for the human heart, not merely the body.
Other stories in the volume continue this interest in modernity’s new dilemmas. In “Marriage Bureau,” software is used to match biodata for marriage compatibility, turning intimate life into data and procedural logic. “Anuttarit” (“Unanswered”) deals with childbirth and the transfer of a womb between close relatives, bringing reproductive technology and kinship ethics into conflict. “Test Tube Choro ra Meri Premika” (“Test-Tube Son and My Beloved”), one of the best-known pieces in the collection, belongs to the same imaginative field. It presents scientific advancement as something that can estrange people from feeling and humanity if it is not accompanied by ethical depth. Critics responded to these stories because they represented a departure from more conventional social realism: they addressed science, technology, emotion, and intimacy within distinctly Nepali settings.
A later turning point came in 2011, when Anamol Mani travelled to the United States for journalism training. Travel through different American cities exposed him to immigrant lives from a new angle. In 2013, he migrated to Edmonton, Canada, becoming an immigrant himself. His move to Canada did not interrupt his literary career; rather, it opened a new phase in which questions of migration, identity, ritual, belonging, and aspiration became more immediate. In 2014–2015, he participated in the Borderlines Writers Circle mentorship program with M. G. Vassanji. After the program, he published a story in the anthology Looking Back, Moving Forward, a volume gathering work by participants in that circle .
His second story collection, Unnais Number (Number Nineteen), appeared in 2017. This volume shifts more explicitly toward social issues while retaining the sharpness and conceptual play of the earlier collection. The title story addresses the destructive prestige attached to English education in Nepal. A young man from a remote village comes to Kathmandu for higher studies while his father dreams that he will master English, become eloquent, and return as an admired school headmaster. Instead, the son repeatedly scores only nineteen marks in English on the final examination and, after repeated failure, ends his life. The story is powerful because it turns a number into a social wound. It shows how aspiration, language hierarchy, and educational pressure can become fatal.
The collection also includes stories about immigrant life and ideological contradiction. “Astu” (“Ash”) deals with the complications of conducting funeral rites for an immigrant, bringing ritual, displacement, and community into tension. “Uni Kina America Gaye” (“Why Did He Go to America?”) examines the inner conflict of a communist character who must confront the contradiction between political ideals and the practical possibility of migrating to America. In “Euta Arko Gulaph” (“One More Rose”), a girl named Gulaph moves from the world of the Maoist revolution, where she once carried a gun, into postwar life as a waitress or a fashion worker. A hospitalized man sees Gulaph everywhere—in a nurse, in a doctor, in another girl—so that the story becomes a meditation on trauma, projection, and disillusionment. These stories show a writer increasingly attentive to postwar Nepal, migration, and the psychological afterlives of political upheaval.
Anamol Mani has also published two poetry collections. His first, the ghazal collection Nadi Kinarma Ubhiyera (Standing by the Riverbank), appeared in 2001 and became an immediate popular success as a thousand copies of the book were sold within a few months. His second poetry collection, Saboot (Proof), was published in 2012. Love is a recurring and central theme in the poems such as “Saaunko Antim Din” (“The Last Day of Saun”), “Decemberko Jaado” (“December Cold”), “Prem Viruddha” (“Against Love”), and “Test Tube Choro ra Meri Premika” (“Test-Tube Son and My Beloved”). In the collection, the emotional world of lyric feeling is repeatedly interrupted by political rupture and by changing social realities. His poetry also extends into immigrant experience. The poems address illegal migration, border-crossing, work in schools, community service, disability, and questions of security—experiences linked to the immigrant lives he has observed and lived. This is an important expansion of his poetic field.
Anamol Mani’s significance lies in the way he has brought together journalism, literary experimentation, emotional immediacy, and social critique. In Nepal, he emerged as a writer who pushed short fiction toward new subjects—cloning, test-tube reproduction, software-mediated marriage, womb transfer—while remaining attentive to the emotional and ethical consequences of modernity. He also developed stories and poems that addressed educational aspiration, war, migration, and social disillusionment. In Canada, his writing enters a different but connected field: Nepali diasporic literature. There, his work contributes to Canadian literary life not only because he is a writer living in Edmonton, but because he extends Nepali-language storytelling into North American immigrant settings and participates in literary mentorship and multicultural literary networks. Through the Borderlines Writers Circle, through his continued fiction and poetry, and through his rendering of immigrant ritual, aspiration, contradiction, and survival, he contributes to a broader Canadian literary scene that includes writing in languages other than English and French and that is enriched by diasporic forms of narrative imagination. In this way, Anamol Mani occupies an important place in contemporary Nepali literature and in Nepali Canadian writing.
References
Anamol Mani. “Chest Pain.” Looking Back, Moving Forward: Fiction, Poetry, Essays, edited by Julie C. Robinson, Mawenzi House, 2018, pp. 23-31.
Adhikari, Deepak. “Dabbling in the Non-Linear.” The Kathmandu Post Daily, 24 Aug. 2009.
Adhikari, Rameshmohan. “Anaolko Neelima ra Gadha Andhyaro.” Samakalin Sahitya, 10 Apr. 2010, https://www.samakalinsahitya.com/sahitya/details/2022.
Anamol Mani. “Subash Khanal in Interview with Anamolmani.” YouTube, uploaded by Subash Khanal, 27 June 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=z92vmWxa7l0.Anamol Mani. “Interview – Part-1.” YouTube, uploaded by Anamol Mani Paudel, 29 Aug. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z61cY2cMQE.Anamol Mani. Nadi Kinarmaa Ubhiyera. Bibek Shirjanshil, 2004.
Anamol Mani. Neelima ra Gaadha Andhyaro. Oriental Publication, 2009.
Anamol Mani. Saboot. BN Pustak Sansar, 2011.
Anamol Mani. Unnais Number. Shangrila Books, 2017.
Anamol Mani, and Samikshya Bhattarai. “Interview: Faith in Fiction.” The Kathmandu Post, 24 Jan. 2017.
Anamol Mani, and Kasya Jaddock. “Interview.” WGA, 9 Jan. 2019, https://writersguild.ca/kasya-jaddock-interviews-anamol-mani-paudel/.
Dhakal, Viplav. “Atma Sangharsha ra Kavita.” The Kantipur Daily, 11 June 2011.
Khanal, Shushila. Sahityakar Anamol Maniko Vyatitwa ra Krititwa. MA thesis, Tribhuvan University, 2012.
Khanal, Subas. “19 Numberka Nau Chamber.” Annapurna Post, 13 Jan. 2019.
Pokhrel, Girish. “Madhyam Vargako Marma.” Nepal Magazine, 10 Sept. 2017.
Tiwari, Sarita. “19 Number: Avasaad ra Shokka Katha.” The Kantipur Daily, 31 Aug. 2017.
