Greta Rana

Who is Greta Rana?

Greta Rana, MBE is an author and poet born in Yorkshire, U.K. She has been living in Nepal for over 40 years.

Working in mountain areas in Nepal during her first two decades in the country led her to accept the task of establishing a publishing and PR unit for the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, a regional organisation which operates at the interface of research and development in the eight countries of the Hindu Kush-Himalayas in 1989. She continued to build on this unit, now a sizeable programme, until her retirement at the end of 2004.

In 1991 Greta Rana was joint winner of the Arnsberger Internationale Kurzprosa and in that year she delivered a paper at the International PEN Congress in Vienna on 'Mondialism: The Future Looking at the Past,' which outlines the unchangeability of human nature across cultures and continents based on three recurring themes from the Iliad and the Mahabharat;viz., 'War is futile' but war is inevitable, and it is the duty of the warrior to fight. Against such human destructiveness, the future lies not in the call to conform as in the call to "When in Rome do as the Romans do," but in a human capacity to tolerate and celebrate difference and the whole kaleidoscope of human cultures and creativity.