Pratik Himal Rai Wins Nepal Decides With "Ananta Maya" — Full Results

Pratik Himal Rai won Nepal Decides on Wednesday 7 October 2026 with “Ananta Maya,” and will be Nepal’s first-ever entry in a Eurovision contest. He sings it in Bangkok on Saturday 14 November.

He performed ninth of the eleven acts, with a song he wrote himself. It is the eighth national final of the season to finish, and it leaves two decisions on the calendar: Mongolia’s song on 10 October and Cambodia’s entry on 17 October.

The result

A top three was reported:

1. Pratik Himal Rai — “Ananta Maya”
2. Allam Aadesh — “Byakta”
3. Bullet Flo x Preeti Kaur — “Golden Danfe”

The other eight acts were not publicly ranked, and no points were published for anyone.

A note on sourcing, because we’d rather show it than hide it: the contest’s own report of the night names the winner and nobody else. Second and third place are as reported by Eurovoix and recorded on Wikipedia, which agree with each other.

How it was decided — and a correction we’d already made

The winner was chosen by 40% professional jury, 40% Nepali public and 20% Rest of the World. Voting was free on the official Eurovision Asia website: up to eight votes each, spread across at least three songs.

When this page was first published we reported, with attribution, that the result would be a 50/50 split between jury and televote. The contest’s official preview on 6 October set out 40/40/20 instead — the same formula every national final this season has used — and we corrected it here before the show. That makes eight finals out of eight.

What nobody outside Himalaya TV knows is how those three blocs voted. Whether Pratik Himal Rai was the jury’s pick, the public’s, or both is not something the published result can tell us. We look at that problem across the whole season in Nine national finals, one scoreboard.

Who is Pratik Himal Rai?

The contest describes him as a Nepali singer, songwriter and performer with more than a decade in music and a bachelor’s degree in the subject. His work runs across ballads, slow rock, Nepali folk and folk-pop, and he came into Nepal Decides with two original releases behind him.

He was already a familiar face on the channel that picked him. He competed on the sixth season of The Voice of Nepal in 2025 — a Himalaya TV show, like this one — and two of his performances from it are on that show’s official YouTube channel.

“Ananta Maya” is his own song: the credits on its music video, released on 23 September, give him both lyrics and music. The title is Nepali — roughly “endless love” — and Wikipedia’s entry list has the song as Nepali-language. The contest hasn’t published a translation of its own, so treat ours as a gloss rather than an official subtitle.

All eleven acts, in running order

A dash means no placing was published, not that the act finished below anyone in particular.

On spellings: these are the titles as the contest’s official preview gave them. Other outlets shorten Nirmala Ghale’s song to “Khoi,” Wikipedia lists Allam Aadesh’s as “Project Byakta,” and Eurovoix’s results report gives RC Rimal’s as “K Maya Yesto Huncha Ho” where the contest has “Maya Bisterai.”

Who they were

The line-up leaned on Nepal’s television talent formats, which is no surprise given the broadcaster — and the winner came from the same place.

Allam Aadesh, the runner-up, is billed by the contest as an emerging singer-songwriter with an acoustic-leaning style, somewhere between acoustic pop, Nepali ballads and indie folk. Bullet Flo, who finished third, comes from Nepal’s underground hip-hop scene and was paired with pop and R&B singer Preeti Kaur. So the top three came from three different corners of Nepali music: a singer-songwriter known for ballads and folk-pop, an acoustic newcomer, and a hip-hop and R&B pairing.

Elsewhere in the field, Amit Baral came to prominence through Nepal Idol and Nirmala Ghale is known from The Voice of Nepal. Beyond work in a blend of R&B, pop and lo-fi, and Prithvi Khanal’s entry was pitched as a bridge between Himalayan tradition and modern production. Ram Chandra Rimal had a writing credit on two of the eleven: his own, as RC Rimal, and Amrita Limbu’s.

The show

Nepal Decides started at 19:30 NPT (15:45 CEST) and aired on Himalaya TV and its streaming platform, with the international stream on the official Eurovision Song Contest YouTube channel. The whole broadcast is still there to watch back.

It was presented by Roneeshma Shrestha, billed by the contest simply as Roneeshma, and produced by Saujanya Media for Himalaya TV — a channel with a long back catalogue of music and reality formats, The Voice of Nepal, Himalaya Roadies and Himalaya Lok Star among them.

We couldn’t find the jury’s names published anywhere, before or after the show.

Why it was held in October

Nepal Decides was originally scheduled for 19 September. The reason for the delay was not a scheduling conflict.

On 26 August, catastrophic flash flooding struck central Nepal along the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river corridors, hitting Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading in Bagmati Province and Gorkha and Tanahun in Gandaki Province. Nepal’s Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority put the number of people affected at around 1.6 million. Reported deaths run into the thousands, with thousands more recorded missing, and infrastructure losses included dozens of bridges and long stretches of road.

Postponing a song contest is an unremarkable decision against that. We note the date change because this is a contest tracker and people searched for it, but the postponement is the smallest thing that happened here.

What it means for the contest

Nepal now has a complete entry, five and a half weeks before the Grand Final — one of the shorter run-ins in the field, though the song itself has been public since 23 September.

We have held Nepal at 4.5% in our Eurovision Asia odds. That figure already assumed Nepal would have an artist and a song by now, and a result published without points gives no reason to move it: we know who won, not by how much. The shorter runway is a measurable competitive factor; the flooding is not something to be folded into a ranking rationale, and we haven’t.

Nepal’s broadcaster detail and full profile are on the Nepal country page, and the rest of the season is on the national selections calendar.

Last updated 7 October 2026. This page previewed the eleven acts before the show and now carries the result. Sources: eurovision.com for the winner and his biography; Eurovoix and Wikipedia for the top three and running order.