Prayaag Akbar, Leila
(Simon & Schuster)
Hirsh Sawhney, South
Haven (HarperCollins)
Anuk Arudpragasam, The
Story of a Brief Marriage
(HarperCollins)
Sumana Roy, How
I Became a Tree (Aleph Book Company)
Tripti Lahiri, Maid
In India (Aleph Book Company)
Tejaswini Apte-Rahm, These Circuses that Sweep Through the Landscape (Aleph Book
Company)
Author and translator Arshia
Sattar and poet and novelist Jeet Thayil chose this year's Shakti Bhatt First Book
Prize 2017 shortlist from forty-seven titles submitted for consideration.
Judges Kamila Shamsie, Rohini
Mohan and Margaret Mascarenhas will announce the winner in November.
Arshia Sattar writes:
"The Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize is ten years old this year and even a
quick glance at previous winners will show that the Prize has celebrated
writing across genre, gender, age and nation. Our oldest winner so far was in
his 70s, and the Prize has been awarded to Pakistanis, to writers of both
fiction and non-fiction, to men and to women. It has been a pleasure to
acknowledge the wealth and diversity of South Asian writing in this last decade
and a privilege to spotlight new writing.
"This year’s shortlist
of books and writers continues our commitment to finely-crafted writing and
sophisticated thinking.
“Prayaag Akbar’s Leila is the heart-breaking story of a
lost child and a shattered society. Entirely dystopic, it haunts not simply
because it presents us with a terrifying future but because that portrait of unfreedom,
inequality and brutality seems to already be part of our lived reality.
"Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree is an exquisite
meditation on a personal decision to step away from a life that seemed to have
everything but time. Roy shares what she has learned about and from trees
through gentle essays that explore the natural world and reflect upon the human
condition in the Anthropocene Age.
"Writing from the point
of view of a young boy whose voice has not broken but whose heart has, Hirsh
Sawhney’s South Haven tells the
poignant story of an immigrant family, its men unable to cope with the death of
their mother and wife. Father and sons drift away from each other as they seek
solace in new people, new ideas and new activities. But things fall apart and
the centre cannot hold. Sawhney relies on the pathos of his characters to reach
the persistent melancholia that so often succeeds the sharp grief of
bereavement.
"Maid in India by Tripti Lahiri eerily echoes Prayaag Akbar’s
fictional dystopia as she goes deep into the multiple worlds that domestic
workers inhabit. Lahiri also examines the employment and training agencies that
keep the systems that supply and demand human beings well-oiled, and provides,
in lucid prose devoid of emotional rhetoric, a picture of a society that
thrives on entrenched structures of inequality.
"Anuk Arudpragasam’s
novel A Brief History of a Marriage
presents the civil war in Sri Lanka like never before. Writing from within the
debris of Tamil lives in prose that can pierce your heart, Arudpragasam’s
protagonists find dignity as they piece together strategies of survival. The
story is about the human spirit in the most desperate of times. It sings not as
testament of glory but as a dirge of despair.
"Tejaswini Apte-Rahm’s collection
of short stories, These Circuses that
Sweep Through the Landscape, is deceptively quiet in a literary world of
noisy entries and exits. Alternately hyper and surreal, Apte-Rahm’s canvases
are small. On them, her people and events are like ikons–they gleam with gilded
details even as they occupy the darker recesses of contemporary life.
"Together, this year’s
books remind us that in an increasingly brutal and fragmented world, families,
communities and societies no longer provide safety nets, that individuals often
feel stranded on the brink of an abyss. And yet, it is through literature that
we can search for each other, it is in writing that we can create meaning as a
bulwark against the tides of untruth that thunder on our shores."
