New Delhi: Amidst all the big ticket literary prizes on the Indian landscape, the one that still has the most hearts racing is the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize. After all, as the name suggests, the winner is always a first-time author, and what better start to a literary career than to win an award with your first book?
The prize, set up in memory of the talented writer and editor Shakti Bhatt, who died tragically at the age of just 27, has in the past three years been won by Samanth Subramanian for Following Fish; Mridula Koshy for If It Is Sweet; and Mohammed Hanif for A Case of Exploding Mangoes. This year, as is the practice, a shortlist of six books has been announced, with the winner scheduled to be announced in November.
Easily the most exciting aspect of this year's shortlist is the inclusion of the Pakistani writer Jamil Ahmad's The Wandering Falcon. For Ahmad is 78, not the usual age for someone in the running for a first book prize. The retired civil servant completed his manuscript of interconnected stories set on the border of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran back in 1974. But it wasn’t until 2008 that the work was dusted off and found its way to Penguin UK, where Meru Gokhale – currently Editorial Director of Vintage Books at Random House India - picked it up.
Ahmad's competitors for the prize – one of the few that is open to fiction as well as non-fiction titles – include Mirza Waheed, whose searing novel on Kashmir, The Collaborator, has been at the forefront of angry but moving literature emerging from the decades of strife in that state. The third title in the fiction half is the critically acclaimed Chinaman by Sri Lankan Shehan Karunatilaka, which became the talk of town on its publication because of its unique mixture of cricket and personal history in telling the story of a journalist in search of a bowler who has fallen from grace after an explosive career.
In the non-fiction half, the most striking work in the field is A Revathi's autobiographical account, The Truth About Me, which talks about being born a male but living the life of a female and the quest for an existence of dignity. Devastating in its honesty and touching in its evocative descriptions, the book is a landmark in personal storytelling.
Also in the fray are journalist Aman Sethi's A Free Man, an exploration of a few members of Delhi's working class, written with empathy but without softening the edges. And the sixth title rounding up the shortlist is an off-beat biography of the music – the man, yes, but primarily the music – of RD Burman. Written by Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal, two lifelong aficionados of Hindi music in general and RD Burman in particular, the book delves into each and every album released by the composer, dissecting each song for quality, influence, accompaniment, musical genes, and background story in an incredible feat of musical scholarship.
Arguably, this is the strongest shortlist ever for the Rs one lakh prize. That is, among other things, a tribute to the quality of titles produced by Indian publishers last year. Penguin India has published three of the books – The Wandering Falcon, The Collaborator, and The Truth About Me; Random House India has published two – Chinaman and A Free Man; and Harper-Collins India, one – RD Burman: The Man, The Music.
The winner will be chosen by a jury comprising graphic novelist and illustrator Sarnath Bannerjee, writer and blogger Jai Arjun Singh, and novelist Palash Krishna Mehrotra.
The shortlist:
The Collaborator, Mirza Waheed
The Wandering Falcon, Jamail Ahmad
The Truth About Me, A Revathi
Chinaman, Shehan Karunatilaka
A Free Man, Aman Sethi
RD Burman: The Man, The Music, Anirudha Bhattacharjee & Balaji Vittal
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