Beauty and Inspiration

As mentioned, Graeme MacQueen taught at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He taught Buddhism - and other things. Students nominated him - successfully - for a teaching excellence award. And he became the founding director of the university's Centre for Peace Studies.

So, on the Home page we mentioned The Monkey King and Other Stories. Subsequently, In the year 2000, Orient Longman chose one of MacQueen’s stories from The Monkey King for its GulMohar English reader. (More on that Reader in a moment.) This made the story, “Brighter Still,” available to 100,000 young people each year in India. (MacQueen was asked again in 2014 if the story could be included in Orient BlackSwan's 8th edition of the GulMohar reader.)

And in his role as the Director of the Peace Studies program, in coordination with CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency), he went to Afghanistan on a project for children in war zones. There, he worked with several Afghan organizations in a peace-making project dedicated to providing entertaining, healing stories for youngsters in Afghanistan. Two of MacQueen’s original stories were published in Afghanistan, and translated into Dari and Pashto, by UNICEF. One of them, “Merza’s Heart,” was performed on the radio in Canada (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) in 2002.

The Tulika, now out of print, version.