# Rashid Askari

Harun-Ur-Rashid Askari (born 1 June 1965), known as Rashid Askari, is a writer, columnist, media personality, and an academic in Bangladesh. He was the 12th vice-chancellor of Islamic University, Bangladesh. He served as the Director General of the Bangla Academy for less than a month in 2024. Among post-1990s Bangladeshi writers, He is easily on par with the major ones who gained identical and impressive mastery over both Bangla and English.

## Early life and education

Rashid Askari was born in Askarpur, Mithapukur, Rangpur in former East Pakistan in 1965. He passed the secondary school certificate examinations and higher secondary certificate examinations in 1980 and 1982. He has obtained Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in English from Dhaka University with distinction, and a PhD in Indian English Literature from the University of Poona".

## Career

Askari joined as a lecturer in English at Islamic University, Bangladesh in 1990. He became promoted as Head of the English department and professor in 2005 and promoted to the position of the dean of the Faculty of Arts. He served with King Khalid University - the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a professor of English for five years (2008-2013). His debut as a writer was marked in 1996 by his book The Dying Homeland. He has also written a large number of articles, essays and newspaper columns on a great variety of themes ranging from national to international and colonial to postcolonial, which have been published at home and abroad". He is the editor of Bangladesh's first multilingual international literary magazine, The Archer. He was elected the Secretary General of Federation of Bangladesh University Teachers' Association for 2014. He was also elected chairman of folklore studies department of the Islamic University in Kushtia". Rashid Askari has been nominated as a part-time member of the University Grants Commission of Bangladesh (UGC). He is working as a member of the international publication and translation sub-committee under "Bangabandhu's Birth Centenary Celebration National Implementation Committee" and translated Sheikh Mujib's 10 January speech delivered at the Race Course into English. He also translated in English Sheikh Mujib's UN speech on 25 September 1974.
He is a peer reviewer and a Quality Assurance (QA) expert nominated by the Quality Assurance Unit of the Government of Bangladesh. "Askari regularly writes columns in various newspapers". "The areas of his academic interest include Modern and Postmodern Fiction, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, South-Asian Writing in English, Literary Theories and Creative Writing". In the recent past "Askari has been accorded gold medal for his contribution to advancement of education sector" in Bangladesh. He has also received "Janonetri Sheikh Hasina Award 2019" for his outstanding contribution to education sector, and "won the Dhaka University Alumni News Award 2020".

## Writing style

Askari had a flair for creative writing since his school days. An unsigned profile in The Kushtia Times stated that Askari writes "both Bengali and English with equal ease and efficiency". Bangladeshi novelist and critic Syed Manzoorul Islam notes:
   He writes witty, racy stories with surprisingly serious undertones. Picking real-life events from the remote areas and the marginal people of the country and weaving them into various fictional forms are the hallmarks of his storytelling. Though not new in a ground-breaking way, his stories are both intense and original. The overall tone of his language is gently sarcastic.
Askari has demonstrated enough artistic talent to come up with fiction in English, which must be a source of inspiration for many of us". In his short story collection Nineteen Seventy One and Other Stories(2011) "Rashid Askari speaks of a long-ago war, revisiting the age of brutality we emerged free of through beating back the denizens of darkness". "The book contains a dozen of mind-blowing stories mostly based on realistic events that took place either in faraway villages or the bustling metropolis in Bangladesh. However, the regional fictional representation does not evade universal significance." The book has been translated into French Language and also into Hindi". His short story "Virus" was published in the Daily Sun's Eid Special 2017 and "A slice of sky" has been published in the Contemporary Literary Review India (CLRI), a peer-reviewed , internationally refereed and high impact factor journal. Askari wrote the intellectual biography of the country's founding president Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, which is "based on authentic background information, factual accounts of events, historical research and clear elegant prose". He edited the English version of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's book My Father, My Bangladesh published in Amar Ekushey Book Fair 2021. "Sharp and minute detailed description of human behavior, and pictorial presentation of events and settings in his carefully chosen words demonstrate Rashid Askari's mastery in story writing/telling," says the President of the International Consortium for Social Development and Professor of Social Work at Charles Sturt University, NSW, Australia, Manohar Pawar. "There is a postcolonial undertone in the author's approach by way of debunking the ugly face of the petty-colonial power in the saddle after 1947". "Like most postcolonial writers, his choice of English makes him at once an insider and an outsider – a member of the social elite, who writes about the subaltern." Askari's "sensible uses of stylistics can make it pure theory or theory equal."