A newsletter for all who love stories, whether reading, listening, telling or collecting them. We hope to create here a community space where all lovers of story can gather to tell stories and talk about them.
The stories you find here could be new fiction, a story that we tell here for the first time, or a myth or folktale retold or reinterpreted. Almost every story here has been specially written for The Story Birds and is accompanied by an illustration specially created for it. Whenever relevant, we look at common themes found in stories across the world. We are especially excited when we find connects to India. We also share sources and suggest further readings for those interested. From time to time we look at the art and craft of storytelling.
Translation is an intrinsic part of our work. For us it is a means to share stories across cultures as authentically as we can. So far, we have brought our subscribers translated stories from Awadhi, Bangla, modern Hindi, Tamil, Tulu, and Sanskrit, often with the help of our readers.
We use the traditional Indian narrative device of a frame story to bring our stories to you. Read our opening story, A Chirpy Tale, to find out how the Story Birds were chosen…
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OUR FUTURE PLANS
We plan to expand our newsletter through audio and hope that soon we will be able to bring our readers stories in Hindi and Bangla as well as in English.
Where possible, we will also make available the original audio recordings of stories we have collected in their source language.
We also hope to include more stories of less-represented communities, and to explore the rich world of crafts that tell stories or are connected to story, folklore, or mythology in some way.
You can also find us on Instagram here: The Story Birds.
We are also on Facebook here: The Story Birds
And if you like our stories, please tell your friends about us!
The Story Birds is written by Rohini Chowdhury and Shaiontoni Bose.
Rohini is a literary translator and the author of several children’s books. Her published writing, in Hindi and English, covers a wide spectrum of literary genres including translations, novels, short fiction, comics, and non-fiction. Her primary languages as a literary translator are pre-modern and modern Hindi, and English. Her translations include Banarasidas’s Ardhakathanak, regarded as the first autobiography in an Indian language, and the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas.
She is published by Penguin Random House India, Scholastic India, and Rupa Publications.
Rohini is also interested in the preservation of folklore and traditional stories. She runs the story website longlongtimeago.com, with the objective of collecting and making available in one place as many stories as possible.
She also writes Eaten by a Fish, a research-based newsletter on Indian literature.
Shaiontoni has co-authored two anthologies of supernatural stories, both published by Penguin India. She has also written feature articles for several Indian newspapers and magazines, including The Telegraph, The Statesman, India Magazine, and Frontline.
She is passionately interested in folk literature; she travels extensively and collects tales and stories wherever and whenever she can.
She is also an accomplished artist and has illustrated several children’s books for Oxford University Press, India. When not occupied collecting yarns or spinning her own, you may find her creating multimedia illustrations for stories.
She has created stories with India Signing Hands, a news channel for the deaf, to create entertainment-education content, with the goal of building greater language and communication skills amongst deaf communities.
Please note that all material, including text, graphics, images, audio clips, and video clips on The Story Birds are the sole property of the creators, all rights reserved, and protected by copyright law. No material from The Story Birds may be reproduced, replicated, modified, or used in any form or format without written permission from the authors.
For permission to use any part of our work, please email us at: storybird.stories@gmail.com. Please put ‘Permission to use’ in the subject line of your email.
