New Delhi, Oct 4 Reflecting a deep-rooted sense of community, time, and geography, three debut authors and two Malayalam translations feature in the shortlist of the Rs 25 lakh JCB Prize for Literature 2021, India's most coveted literary award that celebrates the very finest achievements in Indian writing announced on Monday.
The shortlist:
"Anti-Clock", translated from Malayalam by Ministhy S. (Penguin Random House India, 2021)
"Name Place Animal Thing" by Daribha Lyndem (Zubaan Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2021)
"The Plague Upon Us" by Shabir Ahmad Mir (Hachette India, 2020)
"Delhi: A Soliloquy" by M. Mukundan, translated from Malayalam by Fathima E.V. and Nandakumar K. (Westland, 2020)
"Gods and Ends" by Lindsay Pereira (Penguin Random House India, 2021)
Daribha Lyndem, Shabir Ahmad Mir and Lindsay Pereira are the debut authors.
The winner will be announced November 13.
Each of the five shortlisted authors will receive Rs 1 lakh; the translators will receive an additional Rs 50,000. If the winning work is a translation, the translator will receive an additional Rs 10 lakh.
Announcing the shortlist, Mita Kapur, Literary Director of the JCB Prize, said: "Things are looking up slowly and there are a few things that have kept us going through these times: empathy, love, art. The publishing industry has powered on in bringing a treasure trove of literature from all regions of India to the forefront to reach out to readers here and throughout the world.
"Now more than ever, we need to listen to the other, lose ourselves in a new story. These books will spirit you away to worlds unknown, yet familiar in the emotions each human heart shares with the other," Kapur added.
Presenting a cross-section of the multiple diversities in India, Jury Chair Sara Rai said the five novels "speak in layered voices often laced with irony. Inventive and insightful in the way only literature can be, they create disparate worlds, each a microcosm with larger resonances and significance.
"The anguish of Kashmir, the turbulence of ethnic conflict in the Northeast, the disharmony of lives spent in narrow social and psychological confines, each with their specific difficulties the novels dive deep into these particular, ordinary lives and come up having discovered in them the extraordinary," Rai added
With Covid-19 restrictions slowly easing, the Prize is back this year with new on-ground collaborations with stand-alone book stores and Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters with the aim to provide wider access to the novels across India and create a one-on-one interaction between readers and books. The Prize is also collaborating with Amazon Books India for the fourth year in a row as its official online partner to ensure that the shortlisted books reach people in every corner of the country.
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