One of the best known writers from Nagaland, Temsula Ao, is equally fluent in presenting contemporary as well as traditional culture. In the area of traditional culture, the author has produced a significant work, The Ao-Naga Oral Tradition (which provides a framework that categorises different types of traditional oral narratives of the Ao). Of her four books of poems, Songs From the Other Life is a volume that straddles both the traditional as well as the contemporary worlds, in that the framework is drawn from oral culture but the perception and the expression is modern