Four first-time authors in 2019 JCB Prize for Literature longlist

India’s richest literary prize, the JCB Prize for Literature, announced its longlist for 2019 today, featuring four debutant authors – Roshan Ali, Amrita Mahale, Mukta Sathe and Madhuri Vijay. The list also had four women and six men, and two translated works.


The award was established last year to “create greater visibility for contemporary Indian writing”, with prize money of Rs 25 lakh for winner. If the winning work is a translation, the translator will receive an additional Rs 10 lakh. The shortlist of five titles will be announced on 4 October, with each of the shortlisted authors receiving Rs 1 lakh each. If the shortlisted work is a translation, then the translator will receive Rs 50,000.

The longlist was chosen from submissions from fourteen states in six languages, including Bengali,

Hindi

, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and English, published between 1 August 2018 and 31 July 2019. Two works on the list are translations – Manoranjan Byapari’s There’s Gunpowder In The Air, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha and the twin novels Trial by Silence and Lonely Harvest by Perumal Murugan, translated from Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan. Murugan had also featured in the 2018 list for his novel Poonachi.

The four first novels in the list include Roshan Ali’s Ib’s Endless Search for Satisfaction, Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field, Mukta Sathe’s A Patchwork Family and Amrita Mahale’s Milk Teeth. The other entries are The City and the Sea by Rajkamal Jha, The Queen of Jasmine Country by Sharanya Manivannan, A Secret History of Compassion by

Paul Zacharia

and My Father's Garden by

Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar

.

The 2019 jury includes authors KR Meera,

Anjum Hasan

and Parvati Sharma, economist

Arvind Subramanian

and filmmaker and environmentalist Pradip Krishen.

“All of us on the jury were struck by the quantity of historical fiction currently being written. Indian history is now, like never before, the inspiration for novels that address the concerns of the present – painful memories of colonialism, the costs of nation building, the divisiveness of caste and religion, and the need to see the world through the eyes of women. As readers, we wondered what this said about the current zeitgeist,” Krishen said. “Many of the books we selected for the longlist expressed powerful hopelessness, irrevocable damage. Characters are constantly trying to resist a malevolent reality of which, nonetheless, they are fully a part.”

In 2018, the prize was awarded to Jasmine Days by Kerala-based novelist and short story writer Benyamin, translated from Malayalam by Shahnaz Habib.