The longlist for the Golden Quill 2009 awards have been announced and HarperCollins Publishers India represented five titles in the longlist. Twenty-eight books that have made it to the longlist from over 1,000 books which have been written (and rewritten) and published in India in 2008. Take a look at the press release from HarperCollins Publishers.
The focus this year is on Indian fiction written by Indian authors domiciled in India in both fiction and non-fiction. The award has included non-fiction category and The Indiaplaza Golden Quill - Readers' choice award this year.
AUTHOR | TITLE | CATEGORY |
Anirban Bose | Bombay Rain, Bombay Girls | Fiction |
Kunal Basu | The Japanese Wife | Fiction |
Karan Bajaj | Keep Off the Grass | Fiction |
Anuja Chauhan | The Zoya Factor | Fiction |
Pallavi Aiyer | Smoke and Mirrors | Non-Fiction |
Bombay Rains, Bombay Girls by Anirban Bose
When Adi – a small-town eighteen-year-old with a giant inferiority complex– lands a chance to study medicine in big, bad Bombay, he is overjoyed. Although plagued by the thought that his success is a fluke and hence ill gotten, he plunges headlong into the sights and sounds of this dazzling city.
Adi's initiation into college life isn't the most promising — a night of ragging by a bunch of sniggering seniors brings him and his equally vulnerable batchmates close to tears. But gradually, he finds his feet in the new world and makes friends with a motley crew: Pheru, Harsha, Rajeev, Sam and Toshi. It isn't long before they, and the rest of his class—much to his surprise, start looking up to him as a natural born leader. Somewhere along the way to accepting the challenge of this new role and learning the mysteries of the human anatomy, he also has his heart broken and falls in love — in that order.
Then, just when life is beginning to look good, tragedy strikes, and Adi gets caught in an emotional vortex he must struggle to make sense of. Are principles more important than friendship? Does a student of medicine have the luxury of fighting personal battles while patients' lives are at stake? Adi knows that it is only when he resolves these questions for himself that he will be able to hold on to all the things close to his heart.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anirban Bose worked as Assistant Profe ssor of Medicine and Nephrology at the University of Rochester till he returned to India to join the Rabindranath Tagore Institute of Cardiac Sciences, Kolkata as a Consultant Nephrologist. This is his first novel.
The Japanese Wife by Kunal Basu
"It's an improbable and hauntingly beautiful love story, almost surreal in its innocence. And I immediately knew that this was the film I had to make," says filmmaker, Aparna Sen.
"Kurosawa-like preoccupation with exquisite moments of visual beauty… worthy of a Tagore in its understanding of the rituals that bind the human heart," reads the book review of India Today magazine.
An Indian man writes to a Japanese woman. She writes back. The pen-friends fall in love and exchange their vows over letters, then live as man and wife without ever setting eyes on each other – their intimacy of words tested finally by life's miraculous upheavals.
The twelve stories in this collection are about the unexpected. An American professor visits India with the purpose of committing suicide, and goes on a desert journey with the daughter of a snake charmer. A honeymooning Indian couple is caught up in the Tienanmen Square unrest. A Russian prostitute discovers her roots in the company of Calcutta revolutionaries. A holocaust victim stands tall among strangers in a landscape of hate.
These are chronicles of memory and dreams born at the crossroads of civilizations. They parade a cast of angels and demons rubbing shoulders with those whose lives are never quite as ordinary as they seem.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kunal Basu was born in Calcutta and has travelled widely. He teaches at Oxford University and is married with one daughter. Author of three acclaimed novels – The Opium Clerk, The Miniaturist, and Racists – he has acted in films and on stage, written poetry and screenplays. The Japanese Wife has been made into a film by India's celebrated director Aparna Sen.
Keep off the Grass by Karan Bajaj
What do you do when you are a twenty-five-year-old Yale graduate making half-a-million dollars a year as a hotshot investment banker on Wall Street? You bust your ass and become a millionaire by thirty, of course.
Not if you are Samrat Ratan, born in the USA to immigrant Indian parents; you quit and enrol in business school in India instead. Samrat's rollercoaster journey begins at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Bangalore, where he spends his time getting high on marijuana while his grades – and self-confidence – plummet. Soon, Samrat's quest for identity turns increasingly bizarre as it takes him places he hadn't planned on visiting – prison, for example – and makes him do things he hadn't banked on doing: 'meditating' stoned with a sexy Danish hippie in the Himalayas, hanging out with a cannibal on the banks of the Ganga, and peddling soap to the formidable Raja Bhaiya in Benares.
Does Samrat – Yale valedictorian, investment banker, convict, pothead – survive his fall from grace? Read Karan Bajaj's hilarious, yet introspective debut novel to find out.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Karan Bajaj is a management consultant for the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in Washington DC. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore in 2002 where he was selected as one of the top ten young business leaders of India by the Aditya Birla Foundation. Karan has earlier worked as a Brand Manager for Procter & Gamble in India, the Philippines, Singapore and the US, and was nominated a 'Top 40 under 40 marketer in the US.' by Advertising Age in 2007. Born in 1979 into an Army family, Karan studied in various schools in Delhi, Shimla, Ranchi, Jabalpur, Lucknow and Assam. His interests in backpacking, hiking, reading and philosophy are key writing inspirations.
The Zoya Factor by Anuja Chauhan
All's fair in love — and cricket!
Khoda said, his voice deceptively casual, 'So you think the only reason we've been winning is because you've been gracing our breakfast table before the matches, do you?' I opened my eyes very wide.
'Well, obviously,' I replied. 'Surely you weren't thinking it was because of you?'
When the younger players in India's cricket team learn that mid-level advertising executive Zoya Singh Solanki was born at the exact moment that India clinched the World Cup, back in '83, they are intrigued; when eating breakfast with her is followed by victories on the field, they are impressed; and when not eating with her results in defeat, they are convinced she's their lucky charm. Between them and the eccentric IBCC president they coax Zoya to accompany the Indian team to Australia for the tenth ICC World on an all-expenses-paid holiday, on the condition that she breakfast with them before every match. Worshipped by her Indian fans, and vilified by the other competing teams, Zoya struggles valiantly to do her bit for Indian cricket in the thick of the World Cup action. It doesn't help that she keeps clashing with the erratically brilliant new skipper Nikhil Khoda who tells her flatly that he doesn't believe in luck.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anuja Chauhan was born in Meerut the youngest of four sisters and went to school in Meerut, Delhi and Melbourne. She has worked in advertising for over fourteen years and has unleashed lines like Yeh Dil Mange More, Mera Number Kab ayega, Nothing Official About It, and Oye Bubbly upon the unsuspecting public. She is currently Executive Creative Director and Vice-President at J Walter Thompson Advertising. She is the daughter-in-law of Margaret Alva. She lives in Gurgaon with her husband Niret Alva and their three children, Niharika, Nayantara and Daivik John. This is her first attempt at writing anything longer than 60 seconds.
Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China by Pallavi Aiyar
"It is a charming and engaging book on China through young Indian eyes—a nice mix of memoir, reportage, travelogue and sharp observation. What shines is the remembered conversation, reflecting the changing lives in both countries," says author of India Unbound, Gurcharan Das.
India and China share a 3,500 km border and have interacted with each other for over 2000 years. It is remarkable then that their people know so little of each other: what they think, how they live, their languages, customs and philosophy. Or even their cuisine.
Pallavi Aiyar was very much the average Indian in her knowledge of China when she set out for Beijing in 2002. As she headed there, she felt the fear of the unknown. Over the next five years that would change as she learnt Mandarin Chinese, settled into a friendly neighbourhood in the city's old quarter, and developed a taste for the food. Beyond these, as she travelled across the country from booming Zhejiang to troubled Tibet, she also became a fascinated observer of a country undergoing relentless change, and the pressures this was creating in a society free to become rich but not to criticize. India's own experience of change, its strengths and many weaknesses, provided a basis for comparison.
Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China is an intimate look at a society evolving at double-digit pace. Even as it engages the reader with its affectionate portraits of people like Mr Wu, her landlord, and Mohan, an entrepreneurial yoga teacher, it deftly raises - and answers - questions about the deeper concerns of development and freedom that are relevant to both India and China. In the process, Pallavi Aiyar breaks down many clichés, and opens new gateways through the Great Wall of China.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Pallavi Aiyar is the Beijing-based China correspondent for the Hindu group of publications. A Chinese speaker, she has lived in and reported from China for more than five years. She is the winner of the 2007 Prem Bhatia Memorial Award for excellence in political reporting and analysis, the youngest ever recipient of the prize. She was also awarded a Reuters Foundation Fellowship for study at Oxford in the same year. In addition to her work as a journalist, Pallavi serves as an adviser to the Confederation of Indian Industry on China-related issues. Pallavi has university degrees in philosophy, history and media sociology from St Stephen's College, New Delhi, Oxford University and the London School of Economics.
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