At one point in the Tibetan writer-in-exile Tsering Yangzom Lama’s evocative debut novel We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, the protagonist, Dolma, says, “People find our culture beautiful … But not our suffering.” She has stolen a ku – a statue – of a nameless saint from the vault of a rich white Canadian collector, an artefact that has time and again found a way to emerge whenever her family is in need of protection. Her birth-father, Samphel, who sold the statue to foreigners, tells her it was her mother, Lhamo, who gave it to him. “What I do know is that survival is an ugly game, and our objects are all the world really values of our people,” Samphel says. “Our objects and our ideas. But not us, and not our lives.”

In the last few years, a spate of new Tibetan writing in English has appeared. Besides Lama’s novel and Dickie’s edited anthology of essays, the Dharamsala-based Blackneck Books, an imprint of the collective TibetWrites, has published several original works as well as a Tibetan-language translation of John Steinbeck’s The Pearl. Dickie also edited Old Demons, New Deities: Contemporary Stories from Tibet, published in 2017. As Dickie writes in her introduction, “To speak as Tibetans, and to write as Tibetans, is to continually recreate the Tibetan nation.”

Together, books – and the wave of new Tibetan writing that has burst forth in recent years – form a larger tapestry, one that feels continuous in design yet interrupted by history and memory. Contemporary Tibetan writing is built on resistance, born out of both displacement and life under autocracy, and incontrovertibly asks to be read not as a treatise on how Tibet is to be imagined. There are moments where such literature can be said to be performative, especially when it comes to addressing temporal issues, but this is to be expected. Nonetheless, these moments do not take away from the corpus of new Tibetan writing.