Greta Rana

Hidden Women released in May 2012 by Roli Books, India, is the historical novel about the wives and concubines of Jung Bahadur Kunwar Rana the founder of the Rana dynasty. It is a novel look at his story, worn out by many Nepali writers, because it is told through the eyes of the women in his life; and starts with his wet nurse. Very little is known about the lives of Nepali women but the author has used research for a doctorate undertaken many years previously to build together a feasible picture of how women lived and thought, hoped and died in a restrictive feudal environment.

In 1991 Greta Rana was joint winner of the Arnsberger Internationale Kurzprosa and in that year she delivered a paper at the International PEN Congress in Vienna on 'Mondialism: The Future Looking at the Past,' which outlines the unchangeability of human nature across cultures and continents based on three recurring themes from the Iliad and the Mahabharat;viz.,'War is futile' but war is inevitable, and it is the duty of the warrior to fight. Against such human destructiveness, the future lies not in the call to conform as in the call to "When in Rome do as the Romans do," but in a human capacity to tolerate and celebrate difference and the whole kaleidoscope of human cultures and creativity.

Working in mountain areas in Nepal during her first two decades in the country led her to accept the task of establishing a publishing and PR unit for the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), a regional organisation which operates at the interface of research and development in the eight countries of the Hindu Kush-Himalayas in 1989. She continued to build on this unit, now a sizeable programme, until her retirement at the end of 2004.

She was one of the founders of the PEN Centre in Nepal in 1987 and has recently become a member of the PEN centre of San Miguel de Allende where she has many friends. She has also been directing plays to raise money for the Nepal Britain Society for social causes under the production name of New Shakespearewallahs for the past decade or so. From 1984 to 1986 she was Chair of The International PEN Women Writers' Committee, representing women writers at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 where a motion was tabled about internal repression of women through 'cultural' mores and the self-censorship this imposed.

In 1971 she arrived in Nepal with two of her sons: her youngest son was born in Nepal the following year and from then on she began once more to write poetry. She has always referred to poetry as her 'highest excellence,' but in the early 70s she was commissioned to write three novellas with a Nepali background for the International Bookfair in New Delhi. These were titled Nothing Greener, Distant Hills, and Right As It Is.

Greta Rana (born 1943), MBE (awarded Order of the British Empire in 2005) is an writer and poet born in Yorkshire, U.K. She has been living in Nepal for almost half a century.

Born in 1943 in the coal-mining town of Castleford, West Yorkshire (birthplace of the famous sculptor Henry Moore), Greta Rana attended the local Grammar school and then went on to graduate from the Victoria University of Manchester. During this period she came into contact with the 'Manchester Poets', 'Stand' and Jon Silkin when she was editor of the University CND's journal 'Fallout.' In 1966 she lost contact with her poetic roots when she married and went to Canada.