A British author and educational consultant is celebrating the publication this September of his first full-length novel which is set in Bangladesh.
Ken (D K) Powell and his family have lived between the UK and Bangladesh over the last 20 years. His novel, The Pukur, is aimed at young adults and published by the respected Histria Books.
Ken, who grew up in Leicestershire and now lives in St Bees, Cumbria, explained:
‘My wife Vikki and I spent several years in rural Bangladesh doing voluntary work at an NGO called LAMB. It was a serenely beautiful and peaceful place. We fell in love with the country and the people. I truly felt like I was coming home.’
He added: ‘As my daughter was then around the age of my novel’s protagonist, Sophie, I was looking at life in Bangladesh through young eyes. Also nearby was this wonderful, slightly mysterious pool, the pukur, that is the centrepiece of the area.’
In The Pukur, 12-year-old Sophie Shepherd, orphaned after a motor accident, is left physically and emotionally scarred. Recovery is slow and Sophie is withdrawn and fragile. She is dumped in rural Bangladesh with a previously unknown uncle who she hates and who doesn’t want her. While the pukur brings peace to her uncle it confronts Sophie with her demons and she finds her fate is entwined in its dark depths. She slowly comes to terms with grief, loss, and an alien culture and she and her uncle learn how to accept each other and find a way through their troubles. Ultimately, Sophie finds friends and allies in the strangest of circumstances and learns that first impressions can be wrong.
Ken said: ‘The Pukur is about finding yourself in a culture you don’t understand – or even like – and discovering not just how wonderful that can be but also the joy of better understanding your own culture as a result. We’re living in difficult, alienating times – in the UK and around the world. With hostility towards non-white immigrants and something of a post-Brexit nationalist vibe, it can feel as if the global village experiment that’s developed since the end of WWII is in danger of coming to an end. I strongly believe that we can learn from other cultures and I shun an elitist view.’
Ken, who was Deputy Head of Music at Whitehaven School for eight years, said: ‘Along with the perennial themes of coping with loss and grief it’s a story about understanding others and accepting yourself – even if you’re very young. That’s a theme which is relevant to young people today in what can be a judgemental social media society.’
Apart from his first-hand experiences of living in Bangladesh Ken was also inspired by The Surya Trilogy by Jamila Gavin, centred around Indians’ experiences of 1950’s Britain and India, and Brick Lane by Monica Ali, about two Bangladeshi sisters. The first draft took just a month to write as part of a National Novel Writing challenge (NaNoWriMo). Ken spent a further ten years writing and re-working the novel before he approached several traditional publishers. Histria Books snapped it up with the whole acceptance process taking around six months. The Pukur is published by Histria’s imprint, Addison & Highsmith.
At LAMB Ken taught and Vikki ran the rehab centre. The family returned to the UK in 2014 and settled in Cumbria as Vikki grew up there but they return to Bangladesh two to three times a year. ‘My son still thinks of himself as Bengali!’ Ken said.
Ken has three other books out, including a photography book of Bangladesh. His TEDx talk about the global village has received almost 45,000 views on YouTube. He is now working on his next project, a travelogue based in Bangladesh called Mad Dogs and Englishmen.
The Pukur by D K Powell is published on 13 September 2022 by Histria Books. Available through good bookshops and via www.histriabooks.com and on Amazon.
