Writing alumna Tenzin Dickie ’14 has published The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays (Penguin, 2023), a groundbreaking anthology of modern Tibetan non-fiction. Dickie has commissioned and collected 28 essays from 22 Tibetan writers, including Woeser, Jamyang Norbu, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Pema Bhum, and Lhashamgyal.
Inside The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays the reader can find essays on lost friends, stolen inheritances, prison notes and secret journeys from-and to-Tibet, but there are also essays on food, the Dalai Lama’s Gar dancer, love letters, lotteries and the Prince of Tibet. The compilation provides a deep insight not just on the Tibetan nation and Tibetan exile, but also captures the love, humor, and tribulations of contemporary Tibetan life.
This publication follows Dickie’s successful editing of Old Demons, New Deities (OR Books, 2017) the first English collection of Tibetan short stories.
Tenzin Dickie is a writer and a translator. She has been a Fulbright fellow and a fellow of the American Literary Translators’ Association, as well as an editor of the Tibetan Political Review and Apogee Journal. A graduate of Harvard and Columbia, she is currently communications coordinator at the Buddhist Digital Resource Center and managing editor of the Journal of Tibetan Literature. Her poetry was most recently anthologized in Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians published by the Indian Academy of Letters.
