Kusum Gyawali is a Nepali Canadian short story writer, poet, editor, radio programmer, and literary organizer whose work connects western Nepal, Kathmandu, and Canada. He writes laghu katha, or short-short fiction, along with poetry and essays. His literary practice is shaped by reading, politics, satire, public speech, and editorial work. His writing draws on village memory, ideological debate, conflict, migration, and irony. Beyond his own writing, he has contributed to Nepali literary life through organizing, magazine and radio work, and the creation of Nepali literary spaces in the diaspora. He has lived in Toronto and Edmonton, and now lives in Calgary.

Gyawali was born in 1973 in Ruru village, which was also called Rimuwa village, in Gulmi district in western Nepal. His early childhood education began at home under the guidance of his maternal grandfather, Devi Prasad Paudel, known in the village as Baidar Ba. Under him, he studied Sanskrit works such as Chandi and Durga Kavach. He listened to his grandfather recite these texts and committed them to memory. This training in recitation and memorization gave him early access not only to language but also to cadence, ritual, and textual authority. At the age of seven, he joined Janjyoti School and had to walk two hours each day to reach it.

Books reached Gyawali through teachers, mentors, and family networks. After a setback in Nepali in grade seven, Chandra Prasad Paudel, a relative and teacher, helped him regain confidence, while Moti Raj Paudel, who had studied Sanskrit and was preparing for the civil service exam, taught him Nepali grammar, shared books on general knowledge, and introduced him to the works of B. P. Koirala, a writer and politician associated with democratic politics. Gyawali also wrote long letters about his reading to his elder brother, Shriram, who lived in Kathmandu, worked in a shop, and taught in a school to support himself. In return, Shriram sent him books, including Soviet works translated into Nepali and published by Progress Publishers, among them Lenin’s collected writings and texts connected with Feuerbach’s critique. He also received Chinese books translated into Nepali, including Mao’s biography, Lu Xun’s stories, and Yang Mo’s Song of Youth. He read Modanath Prashrit’s Atitka Paila (Steps of the Past) and Jivanu Dekhi Manav Samma (From Organisms to Human Evolution), along with Prashrit’s correspondence with Shanta Manavi on women’s position in Nepali society. He also read Parijat’s fiction and other writings. These readings exposed him to ritual Sanskrit learning, democratic politics, Chinese and Soviet literature in translation, Nepali leftist writing, feminist debate, and modern Nepali fiction.

His mother, who was herself a literature enthusiast, also shaped his literary sensibility. She recited Nepali classical poetry aloud. Among the works he heard in this way were Madhav Prasad Ghimire’s elegiac long poem Gauri and the short epic Rajeshwari, along with “Hussu Pathik” (“A Silly Traveller”) and Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s Muna Madan. He also read Subba Homnath Kedarnath’s Nepali rendition of the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata. This mixture of oral recitation and reading gave him access to tonal and generic variety: elegy, epic, satire, and devotional or mythic narrative. In eighth grade, he read Lil Bahadur Chhetri’s novel Basain, which influenced him deeply. The story of dispossession in the village and migration to India resonated with him so strongly that he wrote a sixty-four-page novel of his own, although it remained unpublished.

After completing grade ten, Gyawali moved to Kathmandu and studied intermediate in science . He later completed a BSc in applied science at Amrit Science Campus, Tribhuvan University, followed by a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a master’s in renewable energy, also through Tribhuvan University campuses. Alongside his studies, he tutored school students in science and mathematics and later prepared a student for an engineering entrance exam. He also received journalism training at the Nepal Press Council, where he learned to write, edit, and present ideas clearly in Nepali. He later joined the Nepal Electricity Authority. His literary work developed alongside science, engineering, tutoring, journalism training, and public communication, giving his writing and editorial work a broad practical foundation.

During his undergraduate years, he entered a literary environment that proved decisive for his creative development. He joined the literary organization Sahitya Sandhya after being invited by his friend, the poet Khadga Sen Oli. He later served as secretary of the organization for eight years. At Sahitya Sandhya, he learned not only literary discipline but also forms of social and ethical thought. He has associated this period with learning about humanism and ways of living from the organization’s president, Basudev Adhikari. Just as important was the collective practice of reading aloud, listening, and commenting on one another’s poems. That shared exchange became a training ground that sharpened his own writing. Khadga Sen Oli also encouraged him to write laghu katha, the short-short story form, for a competition and suggested that he read O. Henry. This advice helped direct him toward a form in which compression, irony, revelation, and twist are especially important.

Gyawali’s early success as a short-short story writer came through literary competitions. His story “Shahidle Birseko Gaun”   (“A Village Forgotten by Martyrs”)  won second prize in one of the competitions. The story turns around two men involved in politics for freedom, one of whom disappears and dies in a political movement. The narrator comes to a village and asks an eighty-year-old woman for shelter for the night. In her dilapidated house, the two share a simple meal of corn-flour roti. When the narrator asks about her son, she explains that he had left with the village teacher to join the mass movement in the city and disappeared there. He has become shahid, a martyr, and sends one hundred rupees a month, but despite her pleading, he never returns and leaves her burdened by debt. The story turns with painful irony: the old woman does not recognize that the narrator is the same teacher who had taken her son away, and she does not understand what the word shahid means because nobody has explained it to her. The story exposes the emotional and moral distance between political rhetoric and the abandoned lives left behind by political movements.

His another story, “Shanti Suraksha” (“Peace and Security”), won first prize and brought him ten thousand rupees. Set during the Maoist insurgency period, the story draws on Gyawali’s personal experience of trekking through villages from midwestern Nepal to western Nepal. In it, government forces kill a village nurse and label her a terrorist. As the police move to bury her, one officer expresses regret over the killing of a woman who had been caring for villagers. A mole on the nurse’s face reminds one policeman of his daughter, intensifying the remorse and recognition that an innocent person has been killed. The story functions as a critique of the inhumane violence of the conflict and of the state’s willingness to reduce ordinary people to categories such as “terrorist.”

In 2004, his collection of fifty-four short-short stories, Shahidle Birseko Gaun (A Village Forgotten by Martyrs ), was published by Bibek Sirjanshil Prakashan. The collection gathered together the satirical, political, and humanly observant stories. One of the stories in the collection, “Parampara” (“Tradition”), offers a good example of his satirical edge: Jay Krishna, known as Jackson, attends the Ridi mela, a religious fair by the river in western Nepal, intending to make money through pickpocketing. When he sees a policeman, he hurriedly buries the drugs, dollars, and knife he is carrying in the sand and covers them with leaves. Asked what he is doing, he claims that he is commemorating his ancestors. Later, when he returns to retrieve his things, he finds that hundreds of others have done the same. The story turns this accidental act into a satire on the origins of tradition itself. Critic Mohan Raj Sharma, writing on the collection, argues that Gyawali’s stories illuminate the flaws of human nature. Sharma further observes that Gyawali’s stories range across places, humans, non-humans, and animate and inanimate presences in order to expose behaviour, conduct, and the moral texture of life. For Sharma, the villainy shown in these stories reflects the complexity of modern times, where the villain has come to occupy the centre.

Gyawali is also a poet, and his engagement with poetry includes both writing and the study of prosody. His first published poem, “Ankha” (“Eyes”),  appeared in Shruti Saptahik in 1986. Other poems were published in literary magazines such as Madhuparka, Mirmire, and Samashti, and these publications paid him for his work. His poetry, like his short fiction, often combines seriousness with irony, social observation with lyric attention, and local detail with larger political or migrant frames. One of his notable poems, “North Saskatchewan River,” presents both the river and the figure of the exhausted yet resilient immigrant-writer. The poem emphasizes the river’s impartiality, its embrace extending to all regardless of status or origin. Through vivid metaphor, Gyawali renders the river as at once silent, powerful, resilient, and great, and invites readers to regard it as something beyond the merely ordinary. Like his short stories, the poem uses irony and satire to comment on human pettiness and arrogance. In this way, the poem moves from immigrant perception to ethical reflection, turning landscape into a measure against which human vanity appears small. His political poem “Yasari ta Hudaina, Ba!” (“This Will Not Do, Father!”) became one of the most widely read poems in Nepal in 2021. The title itself is intimate and public at once: Ba, meaning father, invokes familial speech, but the poem’s address also opens onto a wider political and generational register.

He has contributed significantly as an editor and radio programmer. He has served as editor of Laghu Katha Dot Com, Shabda Sanyojan, the monthly literary publication Jyoti, and the bi-monthly magazine Vidyut Sandesh. These editorial roles show the breadth of his involvement in literary and professional writing alike. His radio work extends this public role further. Through programs such as Parijat Kavya Yatra and Sahitya Sodha on Nepal FM, and Srijana Ka Swarharu on Radio Namobuddha, he helped bring literature into aural circulation and engaged wider audiences beyond print culture. This aspect of his work matters because it demonstrates his investment in literary communication across platforms. Alongside literary writing, Gyawali has also published textbooks in engineering.

After coming to Canada in 2010, Gyawali continued to remain active in literary and organizational life. He first arrived in Toronto, later moved to Edmonton, and eventually settled in Calgary. In Canada, he became involved in various literary associations and has served as president of the Calgary Literary Society. He has also served as a central member of the International Nepali Literary Society. In 2011, he organized an important online Nepali poetry conference that brought together participants from around the world.

Gyawali’s significance lies in the range and continuity of his work. As a short story writer, he has contributed to Nepali laghu katha through stories shaped by irony, political critique, moral unease, and close observation of human conduct. As a poet, he writes about migration, public disillusionment, resilience, and irony. As an editor and radio programmer, he has brought literary discussion into magazines, websites, and broadcast media. As a literary organizer in Nepal and Canada, he has helped sustain Nepali literary culture through associations, conferences, and leadership roles. His work brings together village memory, ideological reading, political conflict, technical education, satire, and diaspora life. Through this combination of writing, editing, and cultural organization, Kusum Gyawali holds an important place in contemporary Nepali and Nepali Canadian literary life.

References

Gyawali, Kusum. Sahidale Birseko Gaun. Kathmandu, Bibek Sirjanshil Prakashan, 2004.

Gyawali, Kusum. “Amurt Yaun.” Samakalin Sahitya, 6 Mar. 2010.

Gyawali, Kusum. “Celebrate Pathe.” Samakalin Sahitya, 10 July 2009.

Gyawali, Kusum. “Mainbatti ra Keti.” Samakalin Sahitya, 22 June 2009.

Gyawali, Kusum. “Maunadharan.” Samakalin Sahitya, 6 Mar. 2010.

Gyawali, Kusum. “Nabhaanchine Lauro.” Samakalin Sahitya, 23 Jan. 2009.

Gyawali, Kusum. “Puraskar Ko Dabedaar.” Samakalin Sahitya, 8 Dec. 2008.

Gyawali, Kusum. Sahitya Kusum. Blogspot, thekusum.blogspot.com.

Gyawali, Kusum. “Shantipurna Fusion.” Samakalin Sahitya, 12 Feb. 2009.

Gyawali, Kusum. “Thotro Ghar.” Samakalin Sahitya, 2 Nov. 2008.

Gyawali, Kusum. “Tulaharuko Deshma.” Samakalin Sahitya, 2 Nov. 2008.

Gyawali, Kusum. “Yasari ta Hudaina, Ba!” Khula Nepal, 21 Mar. 2021, https://www.khulanepal.com/2021/03/27/25903/.

Sharma, Mohan Raj. “Sarthak ra Soddyeshya Kathaharuko Sangalo.” In Sahidale Birseko Gaun.