The JCB Prize for Literature is a Rs 25-lakh award presented each year to a distinguished work of fiction by an Indian author, as selected by the jury.
The Prize aims to enhance the prestige of literary achievement in India, and to create greater visibility for contemporary Indian writing. It has a particular focus on translation, and hopes to introduce readers to many works of Indian literature written in languages other than their own.
Each year, the Literary Director appoints a jury of prominent individuals from different fields, chosen in order to reflect the range and diversity of contemporary Indian life. The five members of the jury are alone responsible for selecting the longlist of ten, the shortlist of five, and the winner. Each shortlisted author receives Rs 1 lakh. The winning author receives a further Rs 25 lakhs. An additional Rs 5 lakhs is awarded to the translator if the winning work is a translation.
Administered by the Advisory Council of the JCB Literature Foundation with the very highest standards of integrity and transparency, the Prize will continue to discover and reward great Indian writing for decades to come.
The JCB Prize for Literature is awarded by the JCB Literature Foundation, a not-for-profit company registered under Section 8 of the Indian Companies Act, whose purpose is to promote the art of literature in India.
The Foundation has an Advisory Council, which ensures that its principles and ideals are upheld. The Advisory Council appoints a Literary Director for the Prize, who is responsible for maintaining its literary standards and appointing each year a jury of five discerning men and women of varied backgrounds. The jury reads all Prize entries, narrowing them down, first to a longlist of ten, then to a shortlist of five, then to a winner.
Film director
Entrepreneur and scholar
Theoretical astrophysicist and author
Novelist and playwright
Translator and expert in Indian classical languages
Business leader
Novelist and essayist
Writer
Art historian
Professor of English
Marketer
The rules and eligibility criteria for the 2019 JCB Prize for Literature are available here.
| Entries open | 1st March 2019 |
| Deadline for entries | 30th April 2019 |
| Deadline for call-in nominations | 31st May 2019 |
| Submission of final information | 31st July 2019 |
| Announcement of longlist (of ten) | 4th September 2019 |
| Announcement of shortlist (of five) | 4th October 2019 |
| Awards ceremony | 2nd November 2019 |
General enquiries books@thejcbprize.org
Film director
Deepa Mehta is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker whose work is celebrated on an international scale. Her emotionally resonating, award-winning films have played every major film festival, and been sold and distributed around the globe. Her films include the Elemental Trilogy: Earth, Fire, Water, the final film of which received an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film, Bollywood/Hollywood, Heaven on Earth and the epic adaptation of Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie’s three-time Booker Prize winning novel. Her work challenges traditions and stereotypes and is always daring, fearless and provocative. It’s this spirit that saturated her latest work, Anatomy of Violence. Amongst her many honours, she has just received her star on Canada’s Walk of Fame and the Honorary Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cinema at the Reykjavík International Film Festival.
Entrepreneur and scholar
Rohan Murty is a technology entrepreneur. At Harvard University, he founded the Murty Classical Library of India, whose mission is to present the greatest literary works of India from the past two millennia to the largest readership in the world. He has a PhD in computer science from Harvard and an undergraduate degree from Cornell. His research work on white spaces networking was seminal in opening up a new area of inquiry and has won awards and fellowships from Microsoft Research, Siebel foundation, and the National Science Foundation (NSF). In 2012 he was selected as a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard.
Theoretical astrophysicist and author
Priyamvada Natarajan is a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale. She is recognized for her seminal contributions to the study of dark matter and the formation and growth of black holes. She uses gravitational lensing observations, the deflection of light rays by matter in the universe, to map the detailed distribution of dark matter. Another abiding interest has been the study of the growth history of black holes over cosmic time and, in particular, the formation of the first seed black holes. She has proposed and worked on models for the formation of massive black hole seeds, direct collapse black holes and their observational signatures.
Recipient of many awards and honors for her work including the Guggenheim, Caroline Herschel and Radcliffe fellowships, she also holds the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professorship at the Dark Cosmology Center at the University of Copenhagen, and an honorary professorship for life at the University of Delhi.
Aside from research, she is also deeply invested in the public dissemination of science. She is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and her first book, Mapping the Heavens: Radical Scientific Ideas that Reveal the Cosmos, was published in 2016
Novelist and playwright
Vivek Shanbhag is one of India’s leading novelists. He has published five short story collections, three novels and two plays. Several of his short stories have been adapted into plays and one has been made into a short film. Shanbhag was editor of the literary journal Desha Kaala from 2005 to 2012, and founding editor of the literary supplement of Prajavani, a leading Kannada newspaper. His short stories have been translated into English and other Indian languages. His critically-acclaimed novel Ghachar Ghochar was published in India, the US and UK in English translation; it is now translated into 16 other languages. He is the co-translator of U R Ananthamurthy’s book Hindutva or Hind Swaraj into English.
Shanbhag was a Fall 2016 Honorary Fellow at the International Writing Program, University of Iowa. He is an engineer by training, and lives in Bangalore.
Translator and expert in Indian classical languages
Arshia Sattar has a Ph.D. from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She has been a Fulbright Scholar (2010) and a Rockefeller Centre Fellow (2009). Arshia has translated Sanskrit Tales from the Kathasaritsagara and The Ramayana of Valmiki, both of which are published as Penguin Classics. Her most recent publications include Uttara: The Book of Answers (Penguin India, 2016) and The Ramayana for Children (Juggernaut, 2016). She continues to work with the Valmiki Ramayana and teaches courses on classical Indian literatures in India and abroad. She also writes on books and Hindu myths for various magazines and journals and over the last decade, has been a jury member for several literary awards.
Business leader
Having served for nearly four decades as Director General and Chief Executive of Confederation of Indian Industry, Tarun Das has spent his professional career in the development and promotion of Indian Industry. Today he serves on the boards of numerous companies and non-profit institutions in India and elsewhere. He is the author of Crossing Frontiers.
Tarun is the recipient of many honorary doctorates and awards, including the Padma Bhushan, one of India’s highest civilian honours.
Novelist and essayist
Rana Dasgupta is a British novelist and essayist. His books have won numerous awards, including the Ryszard Kapuściński Award and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. He teaches at Brown University.
Writer
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He is the author of two books of non-fiction, a collection of essays and eight novels. His most recent book is The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). His books have won prizes in India, Europe and Myanmar and he has been awarded honorary degrees by the Sorbonne, Paris, and by Queens College, New York. He is married to the writer Deborah Baker and divides his time between Brooklyn, Goa and Kolkata.
Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival. In 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honours, by the President of India.
Art historian
Dr. Pheroza J. Godrej is an art historian and curator based in Mumbai. She is Chairperson of the Museum Society of Mumbai and a passionate promoter of India’s museum and gallery sector.
Professor of English
Harish Trivedi is a former Professor of English at the University of Delhi, and visiting professor at the universities of Chicago and London. His publications include Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (1995), Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (1999), The Nation across the World: Postcolonial Literary Representations (2007), and an edition of Kim (2011) by Rudyard Kipling. He has translated and written about various Sanskrit, Hindi and Urdu writers, including Ashvaghosha, Premchand, Ajneya, Manto and Kedarnath Singh. As contributing editor of an international project to write a history of World Literature, he has written a history of South Asian literature from 1500 BC up to 2000 AD (forthcoming).
Marketer
Piyush is the Executive Chairman & Creative Director, South Asia for Ogilvy & Mather, where he has worked for over thirty-five years.
He believes advertising must talk to the hearts of people, and that the best reward of good advertising work is when people on the streets start to talk about and debate it.
He is best known for his creative work. His most famous campaigns include Asian Paints (har ghar kuch kehta hai - every house has a story to tell) and Cadbury (kuch khas hai hum sabhi mein - real taste of life).
His work has won over 1,000 awards nationally and internationally. In 2016, he was awarded the Padma Shri, India's state civilian award. He has documented his advertising philosophy in his book ‘Pandeymonium’.
