Ten Indian authors on award list

The ball was set rolling for South Asia’s most expensive literary award when the long list for the inaugural DSC Prize for South Asian Literature was released in New Delhi.

Ten of the 14 authors who made it to the list are from India, three from Pakistan and one from Sri Lanka.

A five- member jury will announce the shortlist of six in October- end and name the winner of the $ 50,000 ( Rs 23 lakh) award modelled after the Booker Prize at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January.

Delhi- based Manju Kapur, one of the authors who made it to the list with The Immigrant ( Faber & Faber), was present during the announcement. She said she was pleased to be on the list, where she shares the spotlight with a mix of established names such as Amit Chaudhuri and Upamanyu Chatterjee and new ones such as Atish Taseer, Ali Sethi and Anjum Hussain.

Also on the list are Tamil author Salma ( who’s also the chairperson of the state’s social welfare board) and the best- selling Bengali writer Sankar, whose longlisted novel The Middleman was made into a film by Satyajit Ray. In case a translation gets the award, the prize money will be shared by the author and the tranlsator.

The award at once gives South Asian writing a bigger profile than it has already achieved, thanks to writers such as Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh. Lord Meghnad Desai, British MP and economist who also has written Dilip Kumar’s biography and a novel, put it in perspective when he said: “ People only look at the money.” The entries for the long list were open to authors from any region who have written works of fiction on South Asia. Jury chairperson and M AIL T ODAY book critic Nilanjana S. Roy said the jury had 50 books to go through and these came from all continents, from Australia to Latin America.

The longlist includes Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Way to Go ( Penguin), Amit Chaudhuri’s The Immortals ( Picador India), Chandrahas Choudhury’s Arzee the Dwarf ( HarperCollins), Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s The Story of a Widow ( Picador India), Ru Freeman’s A Disobedient Girl ( Penguin/ Viking), Anjum Hasan’s Neti Neti ( IndiaInk/ Roli Books), Tania James’s Atlas of Unknown ( Pocket Books), H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy ( HarperCollins), Salma’s The Hour Past Midnight ( Zubaan ; translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom), Ali Sethi’s The Wish Maker ( Penguin), Jaspreet Singh’s Chef ( Bloomsbury) and Aatish Taseer’s The Temple Goers ( Picador India).