Ellen Coon News Today

‘The soil itself is filled with divine feminine energy. It’s alive, it’s pulsating.’ Ellen Coon has been collecting oral histories in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal for over thirty years, recording the stories of the Newar people, an Indigenous community based in the region. Isabella Tree – our guest editor for Granta 153: Second Nature – wrote her first book on the Living Goddess tradition celebrated by the Newars. They came together early this year to discuss the Newar approach to...

Ellen Coon Ellen Coon has been collecting oral histories in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal for over thirty years.  A former Fulbright Scholar, she holds a Master’s degree in Oral History from Columbia University, where her thesis was awarded runner-up for the 2017 Joseph R. Brodsky Oral History Award. She has published articles in the Himalayan Research Bulletin and Hinduism Today, and is currently working on a book about five Newar women, whose narratives of deity possession, encounters wi...