The anthology, Edited by senior journalist Soni Sangwan --Abhaya: Breaking the Silence… by Creative Crows is a unique collection of essays, stories, and poems by 27 diverse and powerful female voices.
This anthology, amplifying the voices of everyday women with extraordinary experiences, will be launched at the AWWA Literature Festival ABHIVYAKTI 4, in Chandigarh, early next month. Abhaya is an unfiltered exploration of the challenges, triumphs, and insights of women in today’s workplace, blending prose, poetry, fiction, and even illustrations. The range is vast and compelling, with topics spanning personal stories and analyses to parenting boys, overcoming burnout, and exploring sleep therapy as a self-care tool.
Readers will find it anything but boring, with each piece offering a fresh perspective and a genuine voice straight from the heart. Most contributors who, although they are not professional writers but real women, share their authentic experiences. Their collective message is loud and clear: zero tolerance for gender bias and discrimination. Abhaya is a testament to the resilience, creativity, and strength of women navigating their paths in a complex world.
Abhaya is fearless, like a sapling, ready to burst from its cocoon of silence into the poetry of a full-blown tree. This is a compilation of 27 such fearless expressions. Abhaya, Breaking the Silence, is a collection of gasps and involuntary cries. These are recollections of repressed hurt and affronts, stories of survival, essays of perseverance, and spontaneous poetry from silenced voices. The women writers speak out about various forms and degrees of sexual harassment that they or someone they know has had to live through. These are voices of early insights and old wisdom, of arrows of chaos jutting out of deceptive calm, and of the baffling contradictions of familiar people and places.
This is a tribute to the woman’s spirit that continues being an exemplary mother, sister, wife, friend and daughter despite the frequent indignities she suffers. The contributors are from all walks of life: doctors, scientists, journalists, poets, homemakers, management professionals, educationists, and academicians. The aim of the anthology is to generate awareness. Truth is, for crimes against women to stop, we must sensitise our sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands with the right stories, and nurture in our daughters bold defiance.
