2012 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature longlist announced
The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature today announced the 16-title longlist for the 2012 prize. The longlist for the prestigious $50,000 prize, which selects the finest writing from or focusing on South Asia, includes both established and debut writers, as well as three translated works.
Notable debut works on the longlist are Bombay based journalist Manu Joseph’s Serious Men, along with Kishwar Desai’s acclaimed Witness The Night, which won the 2010 COSTA first novel award, and Shehan Karunatilaka’s fictional cricketing opus, Chinaman.
More established writers on the list include Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (author of 15 books, including The Mistress Of Spices) with her novel One Amazing Thing which tells the stories of nine strangers trapped in an India visa office after an earthquake. Others include Siddharth Chowdhury Day Scholar, and Omair Ahmad for Jimmy The Terrorist.
Ira Pande, chairperson of the jury said, “The longlist of the 2012 DSC Prize is an interesting mix of 16 titles chosen after a careful consideration of various styles, languages and subject matter. To my mind, it reflects the best of the South Asian literary tradition: a wide landscape of rural and urban life, intricate rituals of story-telling and an indication of its evolving form. This is the East, seen as it is by some of the most promising novelists of Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India, and as it appears to those who live elsewhere”
The Prize is now in its second year, with the inaugural prize last year being won by HM Naqvi for his debut novel, Home Boy, which is set to be published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton on 6 October.
The shortlist for the Prize will be announced at the closing night of the DSC South Asian Literature Festival on 24 October at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London, with the winner being announced at the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2012.
The complete longlist, selected from over 60 entries, is as follows:
- Omair Ahmad: Jimmy the Terrorist (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India)
- U.R. Ananthamurthy: Bharathipura (Oxford University Press, India, Translated by Susheela Punitha)
- Chandrakanta: A Street in Srinagar (Zubaan Books, India, Translated by Manisha Chaudhry)
- Siddharth Chowdhury: Day Scholar (Picador/Pan Macmillan, India)
- Kishwar Desai: Witness the Night (HarperCollins/HarperCollins-India)
- Namita Devidayal: Aftertaste (Random House, India)
- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: One Amazing Thing (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India)
- Manu Joseph: Serious Men (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, India)
- Usha K.R: Monkey-man (Penguin/Penguin India)
- Shehan Karunatilaka: Chinaman (Random House, India)
- Tabish Khair: The Thing About Thugs (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins-India)
- Jill McGivering: The Last Kestrel (Blue Door/HarperCollins-UK)
- Kavery Nambisan: The Story that Must Not Be Told (Viking/Penguin India)
- Atiq Rahimi: The Patience Stone (Chatto & Windus/Random House-UK, Translated by Polly McLean)
- Kalpish Ratna: The Quarantine Papers (HarperCollins-India)
- Samrat Upadhyay: Buddha’s Orphan (Rupa Publications, India)
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