(I began writing Speaking Volumes around 1996-97. Tony Joseph, who was then the features editor of the Business Standard, suggested a weekly column on books after it became glaringly obvious to the paper that I was challenged, to put it politely, where number-crunching was concerned.
Since then, the column has run without a break for years, except for a week in 2005 when I was travelling in Sri Lanka and had no access to the Net, and a three-month time out in 2008-2009 because of health problems.
It's been wonderful writing Speaking Volumes, but I'm taking the next six months off to work on a personal project. Thanks for all the mail and all the support over the years, and I hope, when the column comes back, that it will be the better for the break.)
What is your definition of good English? For a certain generation of Indians, Macaulay’s children and grandchildren, “correct” English was defined by clear markers.
The BBC accent and the Oxford accent were prized over an American or a local Indian accent. The Booker Prize was followed with more zeal than the Pulitzer, though Indian interest dropped sharply in years when subcontinental authors didn’t feature on the list. We were supposed to read Nobel-winning literature laureates, Wodehouse and Agatha Christie, and the Latin American authors dominated our imaginations far more strongly than, say, contemporary writing from the US.
And we dreamed about having access to English the way we dreamed about owning real estate. In both cases, the markers for what we wanted would change sharply over time. The yearnings of property owners shifted from the ersatz British country house nestled in a corner of the hills to the defiantly faux-American mansionette in Gurgaon or Ludhiana.
English as a language still stands for many things in the Indian mind—access to more and better jobs, a sign of modernity, a way of announcing one’s aspirations to be a global citizen. But the kind of English we think of as acceptable has changed.
This week, the Vodafone-Crossword book award shortlists were announced. The Crossword is now over a decade old, and has been grappling with the problem of which writers to include in the pantheon of Indian English writing--only Indian citizens or only persons of Indian origin. This year was no exception, as the Prize left out some of the best and most original books of the year, especially in the field of non-fiction—too many good authors were disqualified because they held the wrong passport. This is likely to damage the Crossword in future—no prize can continue to ignore the best literature produced in the year, no matter how pure its motives.
But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Crossword shortlists was the wide gulf between the literary fiction shortlist, and the popular fiction shortlist. In previous years, the literary and the popular have often overlapped, as when Namita Devidayal’s acclaimed memoir The Music Room won the popular award. This year, the books that featured on the popular award shortlist included works by Ashwin Sanghi, Amish Tripathi, Karan Bajaj—there was absolutely no overlap with the literary fiction list, which included novels by Upamanyu Chatterjee, Omair Ahmad and others.
Tripathi, Sanghi, Bajaj and company are part of a larger trend of home-made bestsellers. The Indian Express dubbed some of this writing “aliterature” in a story the paper did on the success of books like Love Via Telephone Tring Tring and similar works. And the Indian English-language publishing industry, after years of hunting for local crime and pulp fiction bestsellers, is more than a little taken aback at the new wave of writers, for whom a racy plot matters much more than either intelligible story-telling or good grammar.
One way to understand the phenomenon of the new bestsellers is to put them through the Flesch-Kincaid readability scale. The Flesch-Kincaid scale was developed to judge levels of comprehension difficulty, based on factors like word length and sentence length. While not foolproof, the scale provides one way to measure intangibles such as reading ease.
Authors like Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie tend to come in at a Reading Ease of 56 % or lower. If you don’t have a long history as a reader, or you came to English late, in other words, these books might be challenging. Chetan Bhagat and Aravind Adiga weigh in, surprisingly, at similar levels—Bhagat has a reading ease of 86 %, Adiga 76 %.
Unlike more literary authors, Bhagat, Tripathi, Sanghi and other authors use almost no passive sentences in their work, making their books much easier for the reader whose English is a functional, acquired second or third language. The pure pulp bestsellers excoriated by critics, including Love Via Telephone Tring Tring, have an almost uniform reading ease score in the 90th percentile—meaning that they could be read even by those who have very limited English and who experience difficulty with the language.
The Flesch-Kincaid test is only indicative, not definitive. To me, what these scores suggest is the obvious: that we’re producing bestsellers the way the Victorian pulp fiction market once did, to cater to thousands of readers for whom English is a functional, usable but still alien tongue. The Victorian penny dreadfuls were written for readers who had literacy, and who had imagination and a love for storytelling in plenty. What they lacked was a history of reading, and a home-grown canon. In that absence, they turned, as Indian readers are now doing, to pulp fiction as comfort food and junk food, rather than literature. And the gap between them and readers who think of books as literature, rather than a bag of chips, is likely to become even wider over the next decade.
Showing posts with label Vodafone Crossword. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vodafone Crossword. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 03, 2011
Monday, August 03, 2009
The BS Column: In search of an Asian prize
(Published in the Business Standard, July 27, 2009)
The literary world attracts its share of harmless lunatics, and for some years, my mailbox was enlivened by the presence of a gentleman I will call Mr S K Parthasarathi. He had never been published, but had a burning desire to be recognised as an author.
For three consecutive years, he sent out exuberant emails announcing: “The S K Parthasarathi Award for Stellar and Superior Writing, judged by eminent Man of Letters Mr S K Parthasarathi, has been won by the finest Author, Mr S K Parthasarathi.” When he stopped sending the mails, it left a void in my life that nothing, not the Crossword, the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize nor the Man Asian Booker could fill.
The SK Parthasarathi Award had this to its credit: it kept all parties happy, from the author to the judge to the prize administrator. The other three evolving literary prizes on the list face considerably greater challenges.
The Vodafone Crossword award has grown over the last eleven years, evolving as a multitude of issues from the nationality of the authors to the visibility of the prize has emerged. This year, the fiction award was split between debut author Neel Mukherjee (Past Continuous) and Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies), in a decision that kicked off a post-ceremony debate. Is it fair to judge a new writer against someone who has been writing for years? The Booker judges sometimes deal with this by producing controversial shortlists, ignoring the heavyweights in order to encourage less well-known writers.
A two-winner result is a cop-out. The more “senior” author can feel slighted, the debutante can be unfairly judged, and the remainder of the shortlist can feel doubly dismissed. You could create more categories, but that can make an award a hydra-headed monster—too bewildering for the average reader to follow. Personally, I subscribe to the School of Hard Knocks theory—as a first-time author, your books are going to be judged by readers anyway against the greats. There are times when a debut author’s creativity and freshness will carry the day, and times when years of learning the craft will make a greater impact.
The Man Asian Booker has seen a sharp learning curve since its inception in 2007. The judges’ panel in the first year was drawn out of convenience chiefly from the Hong Kong literary world, since the prize was set up there; this year, the panel has a much wider sweep, with Gish Jen, Pankaj Mishra and Colm Toibin at the helm.
It remains the only major prize to encourage unpublished writers, and to accept manuscripts that have not been written in English. This puts more pressure on the prize administrators, in terms of the volume and range of manuscripts they have to evaluate, and the longlist often shows a huge variation in quality. The prize is still in its third year, and has time to evolve; if it becomes a useful scouting ground for publishers and literary agents, the Man Asian will have done a great deal to erase the invisibility of Asian authors. With a stronger focus on literary quality, this could grow into a substantial prize.
The Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize was instituted in 2008 in memory of the young and talented writer/editor who died in 2007. Its guidelines offer one way of looking at the tricky issue of how to handle an Asian prize. It’s open to all writers from the subcontinent, which takes care of the phantom author syndrome—the nagging sense you get when reading an awards shortlist that someone is missing, only to realise that the author you’re missing is Pakistani or Bangladeshi, not Indian.
By limiting books to the subcontinent, it manages to duck the other thorny issue—how do you define an Asian writer? (Do you include Iran, does an author from coastal China really have anything in common with an author from Nepal, that sort of thing.) The Shakti Bhatt prize is open to all genres. The categories are clearly literary rather than general: poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction (travel writing, autobiography, biography and narrative journalism) and drama.
The stipulation that all books must have been published in India gives entries a local focus. And in a more charming caveat emptor, the guidelines state: “Books that have been published elsewhere and have already won prizes are eligible, though less likely to win.” The breadth of genres might become a tricky area for the prize—it’s hard to judge the merits of poetry versus travel writing, for instance—but the 2008 shortlist was definitely one of the most interesting, from the reader’s point of view.
I don’t know whether any of these three prizes will become the pre-eminent “Asian” prize, but I do hope Shou Xing, god of longevity, will smile on them. As a collective of prizes, they’re likely to sharpen and redefine our view of Asian writing.
N.B. There is also the Golden Quill award, promoted by Indiaplaza, but it hasn't yet defined its criteria. At present, pulp and literary fiction are grouped together, which gives the Quill a very wide but puzzling selection of books. Take a look at this year's longlist.
The literary world attracts its share of harmless lunatics, and for some years, my mailbox was enlivened by the presence of a gentleman I will call Mr S K Parthasarathi. He had never been published, but had a burning desire to be recognised as an author.
For three consecutive years, he sent out exuberant emails announcing: “The S K Parthasarathi Award for Stellar and Superior Writing, judged by eminent Man of Letters Mr S K Parthasarathi, has been won by the finest Author, Mr S K Parthasarathi.” When he stopped sending the mails, it left a void in my life that nothing, not the Crossword, the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize nor the Man Asian Booker could fill.
The SK Parthasarathi Award had this to its credit: it kept all parties happy, from the author to the judge to the prize administrator. The other three evolving literary prizes on the list face considerably greater challenges.
The Vodafone Crossword award has grown over the last eleven years, evolving as a multitude of issues from the nationality of the authors to the visibility of the prize has emerged. This year, the fiction award was split between debut author Neel Mukherjee (Past Continuous) and Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies), in a decision that kicked off a post-ceremony debate. Is it fair to judge a new writer against someone who has been writing for years? The Booker judges sometimes deal with this by producing controversial shortlists, ignoring the heavyweights in order to encourage less well-known writers.
A two-winner result is a cop-out. The more “senior” author can feel slighted, the debutante can be unfairly judged, and the remainder of the shortlist can feel doubly dismissed. You could create more categories, but that can make an award a hydra-headed monster—too bewildering for the average reader to follow. Personally, I subscribe to the School of Hard Knocks theory—as a first-time author, your books are going to be judged by readers anyway against the greats. There are times when a debut author’s creativity and freshness will carry the day, and times when years of learning the craft will make a greater impact.
The Man Asian Booker has seen a sharp learning curve since its inception in 2007. The judges’ panel in the first year was drawn out of convenience chiefly from the Hong Kong literary world, since the prize was set up there; this year, the panel has a much wider sweep, with Gish Jen, Pankaj Mishra and Colm Toibin at the helm.
It remains the only major prize to encourage unpublished writers, and to accept manuscripts that have not been written in English. This puts more pressure on the prize administrators, in terms of the volume and range of manuscripts they have to evaluate, and the longlist often shows a huge variation in quality. The prize is still in its third year, and has time to evolve; if it becomes a useful scouting ground for publishers and literary agents, the Man Asian will have done a great deal to erase the invisibility of Asian authors. With a stronger focus on literary quality, this could grow into a substantial prize.
The Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize was instituted in 2008 in memory of the young and talented writer/editor who died in 2007. Its guidelines offer one way of looking at the tricky issue of how to handle an Asian prize. It’s open to all writers from the subcontinent, which takes care of the phantom author syndrome—the nagging sense you get when reading an awards shortlist that someone is missing, only to realise that the author you’re missing is Pakistani or Bangladeshi, not Indian.
By limiting books to the subcontinent, it manages to duck the other thorny issue—how do you define an Asian writer? (Do you include Iran, does an author from coastal China really have anything in common with an author from Nepal, that sort of thing.) The Shakti Bhatt prize is open to all genres. The categories are clearly literary rather than general: poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction (travel writing, autobiography, biography and narrative journalism) and drama.
The stipulation that all books must have been published in India gives entries a local focus. And in a more charming caveat emptor, the guidelines state: “Books that have been published elsewhere and have already won prizes are eligible, though less likely to win.” The breadth of genres might become a tricky area for the prize—it’s hard to judge the merits of poetry versus travel writing, for instance—but the 2008 shortlist was definitely one of the most interesting, from the reader’s point of view.
I don’t know whether any of these three prizes will become the pre-eminent “Asian” prize, but I do hope Shou Xing, god of longevity, will smile on them. As a collective of prizes, they’re likely to sharpen and redefine our view of Asian writing.
N.B. There is also the Golden Quill award, promoted by Indiaplaza, but it hasn't yet defined its criteria. At present, pulp and literary fiction are grouped together, which gives the Quill a very wide but puzzling selection of books. Take a look at this year's longlist.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
The Crossword Award: translators
Translators, briefly profiled--Prema Jayakumar ("There has to be an emotional involvement") and Ira Pande: "It seems to me that each time we present a book as a translated work, we offer an apology for writing in a language that is not the globalised and the mainstream one. This shows a terrible lack of faith in our literary worth and self-image."
Prema Jayakumar's translation of M S Sethu's The Wind from the Hills and Ira Pande's translation of the late Manohar Shyam Joshi's T'ta Professor are on the shortlist for the Vodafone Crossword award, winners to be announced next week on the 23rd.
There's an interesting discussion of the award in the comments section of this blog: does the Crossword matter to readers?
Prema Jayakumar's translation of M S Sethu's The Wind from the Hills and Ira Pande's translation of the late Manohar Shyam Joshi's T'ta Professor are on the shortlist for the Vodafone Crossword award, winners to be announced next week on the 23rd.
There's an interesting discussion of the award in the comments section of this blog: does the Crossword matter to readers?
Thursday, July 02, 2009
The BS Column: Crossword shortlists 2009
(Published in the Business Standard, 29 June 2009)
In the eleven years since the first Crossword award was instituted, several groups of people have benefited. The awards have been handed out for nine years—it took a three-year break from 2000 to 2004—and the categories have expanded from just English fiction by Indian writers to include non-fiction, Indian language fiction in translation, and a new award for popular writing. Authors, translators and publishers value an Indian prize; reviewers like me welcome the overview of the year’s writing that the Crossword gives you. But does it work for readers?
The Vodafone Crossword shortlists were announced last week and after a decade, it’s easy to see the challenges in the award’s path. The biggest practical problem the Vodafone Crossword faces today is a lack of support from other booksellers; Crossword is a bookstore chain, and many booksellers won’t give prominence to the awards, arguing that it’s free publicity for a rival. The second biggest problem is that while the awards are anticipated, discussed and debated by a small group of readers and industry insiders, it hasn’t been able to draw in the average reader. Looking at the shortlists by category gives you a better sense of the issues involved in running an “Indian” book award.
English fiction shortlist:
Salman Rushdie's 'The Enchantress of Florence' (Random House)
Amitav Ghosh's 'Sea of Poppies' (Penguin India)
Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Unaccustomed Earth' (Random House)
Neel Mukherjee's 'Past Continuous' (Picador India)
Manjula Padmanabhan's 'Escape' (Picador India)
Anuradha Roy's 'An Atlas of Impossible Longings' (Picador India)
Preeta Samarasan's 'Evening is the Whole Day' (HarperCollins India)
At seven books, this is a larger-than-normal shortlist, making it glaringly obvious that Crossword’s judges this year were underwhelmed by Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winning The White Tiger. Picador’s hat-trick is of special interest because its three authors are “home-grown”—ie, first published in India. Opening the list up to authors of Indian origin has allowed the inclusion of Jhumpa Lahiri—her first two books were eligible for US prizes, but not for the Crossword because it was open only to resident Indians/ Indian passport holders at the time.
The debate over who qualifies as an Indian writer will continue—currently, the prize is open to anyone who qualifies under the Person of Indian Origin guidelines. Being more inclusive allows more wide-ranging and high quality fiction—which is better for readers—but also creates concerns over whether this might not become too broad in scope. It’s also interesting to see how many writers on this list live for part or most of the year outside India, reflecting the wider shift in the lives of the urban Indian elite.
English non-fiction shortlist:
Pallavi Aiyer's Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China (HarperCollins India)
Basharat Peer's Curfewed Nights (Random House)
Sudeep Chakravarti's Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (Penguin)
Edna Fernandes' The Last Jews of Kerala (Penguin)
Chaturvedi Badrinath's The Women of the Mahabharata (Orient Blackswan)
From the average reader’s perspective, the non-fiction shortlist usually delivers the most interesting list of books. It’s also the most demanding to judge—it’s harder to set standards for different kinds of non-fiction writing (travelogues versus biographies, memoirs versus criticism). Sudeep Chakravarti and Basharat Peer would be the favourites this year, but keep an eye on Edna Fernandes’ fascinating history of a vanishing community. The list excludes several popular bestsellers, including business biographies, in favour of more stylish and presumably more lasting writing.
Indian language fiction in translation shortlist:
Jayakantan's Dissonance and Other Stories
translated by K.S. Subramanian (Katha)
Manto's Selected Stories
translated by Aatish Taseer (Random House)
Manohar Shyam Joshi's T’TA Professor”
translated by Ira Pande (Penguin)
M S Sethu's The Wind from the Hills
translated by Prema Jayakumar (Tranquebar)
The longlist for this year’s award promised some interesting work, but translations remain invisible—it’s hard to find many of the books in the stores. Perhaps one of the most significant achievements of the VC award has been that it’s brought the translator into far more prominence. The best translation of 2008 was probably the Blaft anthology of Tamil pulp fiction, but anthologies are seldom eligible for mainstream literary prizes anywhere in the world. I can’t see an easy way for the VC award, or any award, to get around this.
The big debate for the last decade was whether to include works by dead authors. Sriram, who helped to run the award for several years, got into a bit of a tangle during the shortlist discussion in Delhi, first defending the decision to limit the list to living authors before he realised that the rules had changed this year. The current rules now require the translator to be among the living, and opening it up to past (and often previously untranslated) classics might help attract more readers.
That still leaves the question we started with. The shortlists offer a wide range of interesting and very diverse books— but until readers queue up in the hundreds to buy them, there's a missing piece in this Crossword puzzle.
In the eleven years since the first Crossword award was instituted, several groups of people have benefited. The awards have been handed out for nine years—it took a three-year break from 2000 to 2004—and the categories have expanded from just English fiction by Indian writers to include non-fiction, Indian language fiction in translation, and a new award for popular writing. Authors, translators and publishers value an Indian prize; reviewers like me welcome the overview of the year’s writing that the Crossword gives you. But does it work for readers?
The Vodafone Crossword shortlists were announced last week and after a decade, it’s easy to see the challenges in the award’s path. The biggest practical problem the Vodafone Crossword faces today is a lack of support from other booksellers; Crossword is a bookstore chain, and many booksellers won’t give prominence to the awards, arguing that it’s free publicity for a rival. The second biggest problem is that while the awards are anticipated, discussed and debated by a small group of readers and industry insiders, it hasn’t been able to draw in the average reader. Looking at the shortlists by category gives you a better sense of the issues involved in running an “Indian” book award.
English fiction shortlist: Salman Rushdie's 'The Enchantress of Florence' (Random House)
Amitav Ghosh's 'Sea of Poppies' (Penguin India)
Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Unaccustomed Earth' (Random House)
Neel Mukherjee's 'Past Continuous' (Picador India)
Manjula Padmanabhan's 'Escape' (Picador India)
Anuradha Roy's 'An Atlas of Impossible Longings' (Picador India)
Preeta Samarasan's 'Evening is the Whole Day' (HarperCollins India)
At seven books, this is a larger-than-normal shortlist, making it glaringly obvious that Crossword’s judges this year were underwhelmed by Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winning The White Tiger. Picador’s hat-trick is of special interest because its three authors are “home-grown”—ie, first published in India. Opening the list up to authors of Indian origin has allowed the inclusion of Jhumpa Lahiri—her first two books were eligible for US prizes, but not for the Crossword because it was open only to resident Indians/ Indian passport holders at the time.
The debate over who qualifies as an Indian writer will continue—currently, the prize is open to anyone who qualifies under the Person of Indian Origin guidelines. Being more inclusive allows more wide-ranging and high quality fiction—which is better for readers—but also creates concerns over whether this might not become too broad in scope. It’s also interesting to see how many writers on this list live for part or most of the year outside India, reflecting the wider shift in the lives of the urban Indian elite.
English non-fiction shortlist: Pallavi Aiyer's Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China (HarperCollins India)
Basharat Peer's Curfewed Nights (Random House)
Sudeep Chakravarti's Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (Penguin)
Edna Fernandes' The Last Jews of Kerala (Penguin)
Chaturvedi Badrinath's The Women of the Mahabharata (Orient Blackswan)
From the average reader’s perspective, the non-fiction shortlist usually delivers the most interesting list of books. It’s also the most demanding to judge—it’s harder to set standards for different kinds of non-fiction writing (travelogues versus biographies, memoirs versus criticism). Sudeep Chakravarti and Basharat Peer would be the favourites this year, but keep an eye on Edna Fernandes’ fascinating history of a vanishing community. The list excludes several popular bestsellers, including business biographies, in favour of more stylish and presumably more lasting writing.
Indian language fiction in translation shortlist: Jayakantan's Dissonance and Other Stories
translated by K.S. Subramanian (Katha)
Manto's Selected Stories
translated by Aatish Taseer (Random House)
Manohar Shyam Joshi's T’TA Professor”
translated by Ira Pande (Penguin)
M S Sethu's The Wind from the Hills
translated by Prema Jayakumar (Tranquebar)
The longlist for this year’s award promised some interesting work, but translations remain invisible—it’s hard to find many of the books in the stores. Perhaps one of the most significant achievements of the VC award has been that it’s brought the translator into far more prominence. The best translation of 2008 was probably the Blaft anthology of Tamil pulp fiction, but anthologies are seldom eligible for mainstream literary prizes anywhere in the world. I can’t see an easy way for the VC award, or any award, to get around this.
The big debate for the last decade was whether to include works by dead authors. Sriram, who helped to run the award for several years, got into a bit of a tangle during the shortlist discussion in Delhi, first defending the decision to limit the list to living authors before he realised that the rules had changed this year. The current rules now require the translator to be among the living, and opening it up to past (and often previously untranslated) classics might help attract more readers.
That still leaves the question we started with. The shortlists offer a wide range of interesting and very diverse books— but until readers queue up in the hundreds to buy them, there's a missing piece in this Crossword puzzle.
Monday, June 29, 2009
The Vodafone-Crossword shortlist, 2009
...is here. My apologies, meant to put this up earlier but had computer and Net problems.
English fiction contenders:
Salman Rushdie's 'The Enchantress of Florence' (Random House)
Amitav Ghosh's 'Sea of Poppies' (Penguin India)
Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Unaccustomed Earth' (Random House)
Neel Mukherjee's 'Past Continuous' (Picador India)
Manjula Padmanabhan's 'Escape' (Picador India)
Anuradha Roy's 'An Atlas of Impossible Longings' (Picador India)
Preeta Samarasan's 'Evening is the Whole Day' (HarperCollins India)
English non-fiction contenders:
Pallavi Aiyer's Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China (HarperCollins India)
Basharat Peer's Curfewed Nights (Random House)
Sudeep Chakravarti's Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (Penguin)
Edna Fernandes' The Last Jews of Kerala (Penguin)
Chaturvedi Badrinath's The Women of the Mahabharata (Orient Blackswan)
Indian language fiction in translation contenders:
Jayakantan's Dissonance and Other Stories
translated by K.S. Subramanian (Katha)
Manto's Selected Stories
translated by Aatish Taseer (Random House)
Manohar Shyam Joshi's T’TA Professor”
translated by Ira Pande (Penguin)
M S Sethu's The Wind from the Hills
translated by Prema Jayakumar (Tranquebar)
English fiction contenders:
Salman Rushdie's 'The Enchantress of Florence' (Random House)
Amitav Ghosh's 'Sea of Poppies' (Penguin India)
Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Unaccustomed Earth' (Random House)
Neel Mukherjee's 'Past Continuous' (Picador India)
Manjula Padmanabhan's 'Escape' (Picador India)
Anuradha Roy's 'An Atlas of Impossible Longings' (Picador India)
Preeta Samarasan's 'Evening is the Whole Day' (HarperCollins India)
English non-fiction contenders:
Pallavi Aiyer's Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China (HarperCollins India)
Basharat Peer's Curfewed Nights (Random House)
Sudeep Chakravarti's Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (Penguin)
Edna Fernandes' The Last Jews of Kerala (Penguin)
Chaturvedi Badrinath's The Women of the Mahabharata (Orient Blackswan)
Indian language fiction in translation contenders:
Jayakantan's Dissonance and Other Stories
translated by K.S. Subramanian (Katha)
Manto's Selected Stories
translated by Aatish Taseer (Random House)
Manohar Shyam Joshi's T’TA Professor”
translated by Ira Pande (Penguin)
M S Sethu's The Wind from the Hills
translated by Prema Jayakumar (Tranquebar)
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