Keeper of Stories

A critical collection on Easterine Kire’s novels, Naga literature in English, and the emerging field of literary and cultural studies from Northeast India.

Keeper of Stories: Critical Readings of Easterine Kire’s Novels brings together critical essays on the fiction of Easterine Kire, one of the most important literary voices from Nagaland and Northeast India. Edited by K. B. Veio Pou, the volume responds to the growing need for serious critical material on literary writing from the region, especially as scholarship on Northeast India expands across literary studies, borderland studies, cultural studies, and interdisciplinary research.

The book takes a focused approach to a vast and diverse literary field by concentrating on Kire’s novels. This singular focus allows contributors to examine the depth, range, and significance of Kire’s fictional world: its engagement with Naga history, memory, folklore, myth, conflict, gender, death, cosmology, community, and the moral imagination of everyday life.

Among contemporary writers from Northeast India, Easterine Kire occupies a pioneering place in Anglophone literature from the region. Her works have gained growing academic attention across universities in India and beyond, in part because they offer a reimagining of Northeast India beyond the familiar frames of conflict and violence. Through her fiction, Kire gives literary form to Naga cultural memory, social life, ancestral knowledge, oral tradition, and historical experience.

More than a collection of literary criticism, Keeper of Stories opens a space for thinking about how stories preserve worlds. The essays gathered here show how Kire’s novels illuminate Naga culture and heritage while also contributing to broader debates on Indigenous literature, memory, place, gender, violence, healing, and the relationship between oral tradition and written form.

Why this book matters

This book matters because it helps establish a critical vocabulary for reading Easterine Kire’s fiction and, more broadly, for engaging literary production from Northeast India. As Anglophone writing from the region gains wider attention, there is an urgent need for careful scholarship that takes its aesthetic, historical, cultural, and political significance seriously.

For readers interested in Naga literature, Indigenous storytelling, Anglophone writing from Northeast India, literary criticism, folklore, memory, conflict, and cultural studies, Keeper of Stories offers an important contribution to understanding how fiction can carry history, unsettle stereotypes, and open new interpretive possibilities.

Key themes

• Easterine Kire’s novels: The volume offers sustained critical readings of Kire’s fiction and its significance within contemporary literature from Northeast India.
• Naga literature in English: The book situates Kire’s work within the emergence of Naga Anglophone writing and its growing academic recognition.
• Storytelling and cultural memory: Contributors explore how fiction preserves, transforms, and reanimates histories, oral traditions, myths, and community memories.
• Folklore, myth, and cosmology: The essays examine the role of folklore, myth, legend, ancestral worlds, and Naga cosmological imagination in Kire’s novels.
• Conflict and historical trauma: The volume considers how Kire’s fiction engages violence, loss, social rupture, and the afterlives of conflict in Naga society.
• Gender, death, and social life: Chapters address gendered experience, kinship, mortality, village life, moral obligation, and the intimate textures of Naga social worlds.
• Beyond stereotypes of the Northeast: The collection contributes to reimagining Northeast India beyond reductive depictions of marginality, conflict, and violence.

Book details

• Editor: K. B. Veio Pou
• Full title: Keeper of Stories: Critical Readings of Easterine Kire’s Novels
• Publisher: Highlander Press
• Format: Paperback
• ISBN-13: 979-8987933909
• Publication date: December 10, 2023
• Print length: 250 pages
• Language: English
• Dimensions: 6 x 0.68 x 9 inches
• Item weight: 12 ounces

About the editor

K. B. Veio Pou is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Delhi. He holds a Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and his work explores literature and culture, society and politics, oral cultures and written traditions, and the contemporary literary worlds of Northeast India.

His research interests include Northeast India studies, decolonial studies, oral cultures and traditions, peace and conflict studies, Biblical narratives, and English writings from Northeast India. His scholarship is especially concerned with how literature represents social life, cultural memory, conflict, everyday experience, and the complex histories of communities often marginalized within dominant national narratives.

In addition to editing Keeper of Stories: Critical Readings of Easterine Kire’s Novels, Pou is the author of Literary Cultures of India’s Northeast: Naga Writings in English and the novel Waiting for the Dust to Settle. His work has contributed significantly to the study of Naga writing in English, literary cultures of Northeast India, and the interface between oral tradition and written literary form.

About Easterine Kire

Easterine Kire is a major Naga writer whose novels, poetry, children’s books, and essays have played a foundational role in bringing Naga literary worlds into wider Anglophone readership. Her fiction is deeply rooted in the cultural, historical, and social landscapes of Nagaland, and frequently engages oral tradition, memory, gender, conflict, ancestral presence, and the moral imagination of ordinary life.

Kire’s novels have attracted growing scholarly attention because they offer ways of reading Northeast India beyond familiar narratives of marginality, militarization, and violence. Her work opens literary space for Naga voices, landscapes, histories, and cosmologies, while also speaking to wider questions in Indigenous literature, postcolonial studies, folklore, memory, and cultural survival.

Ideal for

This book is ideal for literary scholars, students of Northeast India, researchers of Naga literature, scholars of Indigenous writing, cultural studies researchers, postcolonial studies readers, and anyone interested in Easterine Kire’s fiction and the literary cultures of Highland Asia.

Subject areas

• Easterine Kire’s novels
• Naga literature in English
• Northeast India
• Literary and cultural studies
• Indigenous literature
• Anglophone writing from Northeast India
• Folklore, myth, and oral tradition
• Memory, conflict, and historical trauma
• Gender and social life
• Borderland studies
• Postcolonial literary criticism
• Highland Asia

For courses and libraries

Keeper of Stories is well suited for courses in literary studies, Northeast Indian studies, Indigenous studies, postcolonial literature, Anglophone world literature, cultural studies, folklore, oral tradition, and gender studies. Its focused engagement with Easterine Kire’s novels makes it especially valuable for university teaching, graduate seminars, research libraries, and collections concerned with Naga literature, Indigenous storytelling, and the literary cultures of Northeast India.

Suggested citation

Pou, K. B. Veio, ed. Keeper of Stories: Critical Readings of Easterine Kire’s Novels. Highlander Press, 2023.