Jaipur: Novelist-poet Jeet Thayil (pictured), whose novel Narcopolis was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, became the first Indian to win the $50,000 DSC South Asian Literature Prize 2013 for his novel about Mumbai’s dark underside and the forces that make the megapolis tick.
The winner was announced at the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival yesterday in a short ceremony presided over by Sharmila Tagore and compered by Kabir Bedi. The jury of Muneeza Shamsee, Rick Simonson, Suvani Singh and Eleanor O’Keefe, led by K Satchidanandan, said Thayil was an example of fresh voices emerging from the region.
Thayil was vying with six writers that included Jamil Ahmad for The Wandering Falcon, Tahmina Alam for The Good Muslim, Amitav Ghosh for River of Smoke, Mohammed Hanif for Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, and Uday Prakash for Walls of Delhi.
The jury had received 81 entries, including writers and translators across India, Australia, Britain, the US, Pakistan and Bangladesh, reflecting the importance of South Asia’s rapidly expanding book market. India is currently the world’s third largest English market after the US and Britain. A BBC report says it is set to become the largest within the next 10 years.
An excited Thayil, born in Kerala and educated in Mumbai, said the DSC shortlist was “tremendously strong this year”.
“I would like to dedicate the award to Jamil Ahmad with whom I have beome friends. The prize matters because it is an Indian prize,” he said.
“Narcopolis, published by Faber and Faber, mixes fantasy with reality to create a powerful story that deals with a lesser known aspect of life in a metropolis where episodes collpase into each other as in the tale of Vikaramditya telling an interminable tale about the less fortunate and the less visible human beings in the city,” said Satchidanandan.
IANS
