From Gilead to Ladyland: how the rebellious women of literature offer hope in dark times

After visiting an island brothel in Bangladesh, the novelist was inspired to write an imagined uprising. She explores the radical fictional worlds where women have the power

In the spring of 2024, I am finally able to visit Banishanta, the island in southern Bangladesh that has been haunting my dreams. When I arrive I find it is little more than a long patch of grey mud, with a string of flimsy huts lining a craggy shore. Thirteen years earlier, I was on a boat on my way to the Sundarban mangrove forest when a guide casually pointed out the island and told me it was a state-licensed brothel that had been there since the time of the British.

When I went home, I didn’t want to think about Banishanta, because if I did, I would have to imagine the terrible things the women there were enduring while I lived a life of casual entitlements many thousands of miles away. Yet the women squatted in my imagination, refusing to leave. I resolved to never write about them, because it would say things about the world I didn’t want to know. It was only when I decided I could write a novel, set on a fictional island, about a rebellion of women, that I allowed them in.