Media Coverage
2018
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Meet Shahnaz Habib, whose debut translation has won the Rs 25-lakh JCB Prize for Literature
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Life in a Story - Malayalam author Benyamin on winning the inaugural JCB Prize for Literature for Jasmine Days and life in the Gulf.
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The JCB Prize for Literature is connecting global readers to Indian writing in translation
Benyamin interviewed by NB Magazine, UK.
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Jasmine Days’ by Benyamin, a novel in translation, wins the Rs 25-lakh JCB Prize for Literature
The JCB Prize shortlist represents the rich landscape of India
Each of the five finalists presents a narrative of freedom.
Know more about the shortlisted books and their authors
A celebration of the finest Indian writing of the year.
A formidable shortlist
Why each of the five novels with a unique set of strenghts is a strong contender for the prize.
The JCB Prize breaks new ground in Indian writing
With a debut author and two translations on the shortlist, the Prize is encouraging emerging voices in the Indian literary landscape.
The JCB Prize longlist speaks of contemporary themes and concerns
JCB Prize longlist: What we think about when we think about contemporary fiction from India.
What the jury thinks about the JCB Prize longlist
The inaugural JCB Prize for Literature has included two translations as part of its longlist of ten books—Poonachi or The Story of a Black Goat and Jasmine Days.
The pleasing diversity of novels in the JCB Prize longlist
JCB Prize for Literature: Two debut writers shine among literary giants.
JCB Prize jury member Arshia Sattar on literature prizes
We have to seek the outlier, not the mainstream writer’: Arshia Sattar on judging literary prizes.
What sets the JCB Prize apart from the existing Literary awards?
Rana Dasgupta tells us how the plush new award will move mountains for Indian literature.
Why translation is critical?
We don’t know the debates in Tamil or Kannada or Bengali. That means none of us is reading Indian literature.
Why do we need an Indian literary prize?
The newly-constituted JCB Prize for Literature promises to bring out the best in the Indian literary landscape.
Two new Indian literary prizes promise different agendas
The prize imagines a world where Indian readers know what is going on in every language.
The JCB Prize for Literature gives winning authors a chance to win Rs 25 lakhs
The inaugural JCB Prize for Literature is open for entries.
Can India’s richest prize, JCB Prize for Literature, save literary fiction?
The idea is not only to promote the prize but also to kickstart a conversation about reading and literature.
Rana Dasgupta on why the newest and richest literary award for Indian fiction will be a gamechanger.
The prize is a long-term commitment to energising the Indian literary scene.
India’s richest literature prize is open for entries
A literary award that breaks down language barriers and recognises the full cosmopolitan breadth of contemporary Indian literature.
Media contact
For all media inquiries, please contact:
Amrita Kapoor
+91-9818058964 | amrita.kapoor@flint-culture.com
Anjum Hasan
Author & critic
Anjum Hasan is the author of the novels The Cosmopolitans, Neti, Neti and Lunatic in my Head, the short story collections A Day in the Life and Difficult Pleasures, and the poetry collection Street on the Hill. Anjum was, until recently, Books Editor at The Caravan. She has been Charles Wallace Writer-in-Residence at the University of Canterbury and visiting professor of creative writing at Ashoka University. She is currently a Homi Bhabha Fellow. Her short stories, essays and poems have been published in Granta, Baffler, Five Dials, Wasafiri, Drawbridge, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Asia Literary Review, Caravan, and several anthologies.
Pradip Krishen
Filmmaker & environmentalist
(Chair)
Pradip Krishen is a filmmaker who taught himself botany and became an ‘ecological gardener’, restoring degraded habitats with native plants, mostly in the desert regions of western India. He is currently Project Director of the Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park, Jodhpur, the Abha Mahal garden, Nagaur and Kishan Bagh, Jaipur, and he curates the garden of the Calico Museum, Ahmedabad. He has written The Trees of Delhi: A Field Guide and The Jungle Trees of Central India: A Field Guide For Tree-Spotters. His films include Massey Sahib (1986), In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1988) and Electric Moon (1991).
K R Meera
Author
K R Meera writes fiction in Malayalam and essays in English, and has published four novels, five novellas, six collections of short fiction, two children’s novels and two collections of essays. She has won all the major Malayalam literary awards, including the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award, Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award (for best novel and for best short fiction), the Vayalar Award and the Odakuzhal Award. Her works in translation include Hangwoman, The Poison of Love, The Unseeing Idol of Light, Yellow is the Colour of Longing and The Gospel of Yudas.
Parvati Sharma
Author
Parvati Sharma began her writing career with The Dead Camel and Other Stories of Love, which earned her praise for its depictions of love and sexuality in urban India. Her novella, Close to Home, was acclaimed as ‘tender, acute and pulsing with real Indian life’. She has also written a book for children, The Story of Babur, and, most recently, a historical biography, Jahangir: An Intimate Portrait of a Great Mughal. Sharma lives in New Delhi, where she has worked as a travel writer, editor and journalist.
Arvind Subramanian
Economist
Arvind Subramanian was Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India and is now a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University. His award-winning book Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China's Economic Dominance was published in September 2011. In 2011 Foreign Policy named him one of the world's top 100 global thinkers. He has written on India, growth, trade, development, institutions, aid, climate change, oil, intellectual property, the WTO, China, and Africa. He has published widely in academic and other journals.
Amitav Ghosh
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.
Deepa Mehta
Film director
Chairperson
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.
Rohan Murty
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.
Priyamvada Natarajan
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
Vivek Shanbhag
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.
Arshia Sattar
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.