The
Hutch Crossword Book Award 2006 for Indian Language Fiction Translation
goes to...
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In A Forest, A Deer
by C. S Lakshmi [Ambai], translated by Lakshmi Holmström
About The Book :
Thought-provoking, witty, inventive and stylish, but also deeply
moving, Ambai's stories are among the finest of contemporary short
fiction in Tamil. This book is a translation of her third collection
of short stories, Kaattil oru maan (2000). Included in this book
is also a long story, 'A movement, a folder, some tears', which
is not yet part of any collection.
Ambai's intricate stories constantly reinvent the short story form,
teasing and delighting the reader. They interweave lives, juxtapose
the past and the present, the mythical and the contemporary, articulating
the real experience of women and communicating their silences in
words and images. A mix of narrative forms- letters, dispatches,
journals, emails, memos and articles-adds variety.
The stories, located in Tamil Nadu and Mumbai, in Europe as well
as the United States, touch upon themes of displacement, exile,
and identity; the way people describe themselves and the communities
to which they choose to belong. In 'Journey 2', Dinakaran defines
himself narrowly as a person from Tirunelveli, who can only face
the day after his bath in the river. The narrator of 'A Rose-coloured
Sari' wonders about her individual self, in contrast to the artificial
'Indianness', which she sees in the Festival of India abroad. .
About C. S Lakshmi [Ambai]:
Ambai is a historian, creative writer, and postcolonial
feminist who writes about love, relationships, quests, and journeys
in the Tamil region and elsewhere. She has three collections of
short stories in Tamil; three non-fictional research-based works
in English; and a fourth, an anthology edited by her. Among the
most original of modern Tamil writers, she is rooted in the literature
and modern culture of Tamil Nadu.
About Lakshmi Holmström :
Lakshmi Holmstrom, the translator, studied at Madras and
Oxford Universities. She has translated Tamil short stories and
novels by renowned modern writers such as Sundara Ramaswamy, Ashoka
Mitran, Imayam and Bama. Her translation of Bama's Karukku won the
Crossword Book Award for the year 2000 and her translation of Sangati
was also shortlisted in 2005.
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Kesavan' s Lamentations
by M. Mukundan, translated by A. J. Thomas
About The Book :
Set in a steamy, politicised Kerala, Kesavan's Lamentations
is an engaging witty romp through the complexities of a community,
paralleled with the tangle which is a writer's mind in the
midst of a book. Written as a story within a story - the story
of the writer framing the story that he creates, one merging
inevitably with the other - the book recreates the internal
and external chaos involved in the process of Kesavan's writing,
as he writes his book, Appukuttan's Lamentations. The reader
is drawn into this imaginary world, charged with the energy
of a cast of fascinating, eccentric characters.
In a translation which gives the book a rare vernacular texture,
Kesavan's Lamentations conveys the sights and sounds, the
sultry atmosphere of Kerala, with its fervent political atmosphere,
and its people so distinctly shaped by the same.
About M. Mukundan :
M. Mukundan is one of the most reputed writers in
India today. Author of twenty-eight works, Mukundan has won
several awards including the Vayalar Award and the Sahitya
Akademi Award.
About A. J. Thomas:
A.J. Thomas has translated extensively from Malayalam
poetry, fiction and drama. He is the recipient of the Katha
Award and the AKMG Prize.
The
Judges
1. Dilip Kumar: Dilip Kumar, whose mother tongue
is Gujarathi, is a well - known short story writer in Tamil
with several awards to his credit. He has published two collections
of short stories in Tamil. He has translated stories, poems
and plays from Gujarathi, Hindi and English into Tamil. He
has edited a collection of short stories translated from Kannada
and Bengali intoTamil for Katha and a volume of contemporary
Tamil short stories translated into English - A Place to Live,
Penguin India 2004. He lives in Chennai and runs a small literary
book shop.
2. Dr. H.S. Shiva Prakash: Dr. HS Shiva Prakash is
the Associate Professor, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal
Nehru University. He has worked as an editor for Indian Literature,
the bimonthly journal published by Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi
(1997-2000). The author of six books of poems, nine plays,
two books of criticism in Kannada, he has traveled in UK,
Germany, Italy, Bangladesh, China, Thailand and USA lecturing
on literature and theatre and reading poetry. He has had articles
published in many journals around the country including Indian
Express, The Hindu, Pioneer, Eminence and Kannada Prabha and
has written and researched exhaustively on medieval literature,
particularly Kannada Vachana Poetry and aspects of contemporary
Indian theatre. He is also the winner of Sangeet Natak Akademi
Award (1997), and the recipient of Hrd Senior Fellowship in
the field of literature and the Honorary Fellow, School of
Letters, University of Iowa.
3. Subashree Krishnaswamy: Subashree
Krishnaswamy is an editor, writer, and translator. She edited
the Indian Review of Books, a monthly magazine devoted to
reviews of books, for a number of years. She also edited books
published under the imprint Manas, both original writings
in English and translations from the various Indian languages.
She translates into English fiction and poetry written in
Tamil. Her book, The Babel Guide to South Indian Fiction in
Translation (Babel Books, UK), is in the press. She has co-authored
a textbook, which will introduce literatures in translation
to college students.
She is one of the five winners of the BBC World Service Short
Story Competition 2005.
.
In
a Forest, a Deer is an innovative book of short
stories, which explores the various facets of contemporary
experience in different locales, ranging from a Tamil Nadu
town to a suburb in the U S. The sheer variety of stylistic
devices employed by Ambai is astounding. The work addresses
those liminal spaces where the orthodox self has crumbled
and new identities are struggling to be born. This ever-changing
scenario is depicted with sensitivity to the word and the
image in a highly textured language, full of allusions from
a whole gamut of dialects, cultures and traditions, redolent
of different socio-historical settings.
Lakshmi
Holmstrom has translated these remarkable Tamil short stories
with great competence, capturing the many-layered nature of
the source text. She has won numerous accolades for her fine
translations, including the Crossword Award in the year 2001.
Kesavan's
Lamentations is a widely acclaimed work of contemporary
fiction in Malayalam, which examines the mystique around E
M S Namboodiripad, one of the major icons of Kerala politics.
By telescoping divergent narrative positions and techniques
in a variety of language registers, Mukundan has created a
deeply fascinating novel. Serious and humorous at once, it
appeals at different levels to a wide cross-section of readers
- an achievement that has earned him the Hutch Crossword Book
Award second time around.
A J Thomas,
well-known translator from Malayalam and an Indian English
poet, has recreated successfully in English the resonances
and nuances of the source text.
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H.S.
Shiva Prakash
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Subashree
Krishnaswamy
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Dilip
Kumar
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The Hutch Crossword
Book Award 2006 for English Fiction goes to...
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Sacred Games
by Vikram Chandra
About The Book :
Seven years in the making, Sacred Games is an epic of exceptional
richness and power. Vikram Chandra's novel draws the reader
deep into the life of detective Sartaj Singh, and into the
criminal underworld of Ganesh Gaitonde, the most wanted gangster
in India.
Sartaj, one of the very few Sikhs in the Mumbai police force,
is used to being identified by his turban, beard and the sharp
cut of his trousers. But 'the silky Sikh' is now past forty,
his marriage is over, and his career prospects are on the
slide. When Sartaj gets an anonymous tip-off as to the secret
hideout of the legendary boss of G-company, he's determined
that he'll be the one to collect the prize.
Vikram Chandra's keenly anticipated new novel is a sprawling,
magnificent story of friendship and betrayal, of terrible
violence, of an astonishing modern city and its dark side.
Drawing on the best of Victorian fiction, mystery novels,
Bollywood movies and Chandra's years of first-hand research
on the streets of Mumbai, Sacred Games reads like a potboiling
page-turner but resonates with the intelligence and emotional
depth of the best of literature.
'A writer who is simultaneously a master story teller and
a master stylist' -Francis King, Spectator
'[Chandra has] a sureness of touch and mastery of structure
that are deeply satisfying' -Shashi Tharoor, New York Times
Book Review
'His prose is elegant and various. His imagination is visionary'
-Lucy Hughes-Hallett, London Times.
About Vikram
Chandra :
Vikram Chandra was born in New Delhi. His first novel, Red
Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), won the Commonwealth Writers
Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize. His
first collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay,
(1997) won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia
region) and was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize.
Vikram currently divides his time between Mumbai and Berkeley,
where he lives with his wife Melanie, and teaches at the University
of California. His work has been translated into eleven languages.
The Judges
1. Anita Roy : Anita Roy was born in Calcutta
in 1965, of mixed Bengali and English parentage. She grew up
in the UK where she worked as a commissioning editor for Routledge
and then Manchester Univeristy Press until 1996 when she moved
to Delhi to join Oxford University Press in India. She worked
at OUP for three years before joining Dorling Kindersley, an
illustrated trade book publisher, in 1998.
Since 2004, she has worked as an editor at Zubaan, helping to
set up their children's and young adult's imprint, Young Zubaan.
She is a regular reviewer and critic for Outlook, Biblio, The
Hindu, The Indian Express, DNA Mumbai, and others. She has contributed
chapters to several books, and has authored two non-fiction
books on India for children. She is also the editor of 21 under
40: New Stories for a New Generation, a collection of short
stories by new young women writers in South Asia, to be published
by Zubaan next month
2. Mukul Kesavan: Mukul Kesavan teaches social history
at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and is the author of the
novel Looking through Glass. He is also the author of the political
tract, Secular Commonsense, published by Penguin Books, India.
His next book, Men in White will be published by Penguin later
this year.
3. Shoma Chaudhury: Shoma Chaudhury is a Founder Member,
Director, Special Projects and Editor, Features at Tehelka.
She has been in journalism for 10 years and has worked as Books
editor at The Pioneer, India Today and Outlook. In March 2000,
she left Outlook to start Tehelka.com with Tarun Tejpal. Tehelka's
literary site was then widely considered to be the best in the
country. When Tehelka was attacked, closed down, and witch-hunted
by the government for its path-breaking expose on defence corruption
in 2001, Shoma stayed on at Tehelka with Tarun to fight its
battles and ressurect it as a national paper in 2004. She was
one of four people to do so. Before joining print journalism,
Shoma had directed more than 40 weekly television shows on books
and writers for Doordarshan. She has curated a retrospective
exhibition on VS Naipaul, taught in experimental schools, consulted
with the British Council, and written for several foreign publications
including The Independent, the Financial Times, and the German
paper, Weltoche. Shoma lives in Delhi and has two sons.
Vikram
Chandra's Sacred Games wins the Hutch Crossword prize for
English Fiction because in a crowded field filled with really
first rate writing, the jury unanimously felt it was the outstanding
novel of this year.
Like the
city it's set in, Sacred Games is teeming with stories - love
stories, crimes, stories of displacement, of ambition, of
moral conundrums, of life - lives - and death. In its nearly
thousand pages, Vikram Chandra manages to interweave multiple
genres, each as compelling as the other, each intertwined
storyline finding its own moving, violent, spectacular resolution.
The story of Inspector Sartaj Singh's pursuit of the gangland
don, Ganesh Gaitonde is one of the great detective thrillers
of our time. It is as pacy as a potboiler, as grand and as
ambitious as an epic. Vikram Chandra is a master of the close-up
- zooming to capture every nuance and detail of his characters
lives - but the novel is anything but small screen. The reader
is swept up in the extraordinary narrative ambition of this
novel which not only tells you more stories than you'd find
on an entire bookshelf (in Crossword bookstore!), but throws
in novella length back stories, 'inserts' as they're called,
that act as fictional tributaries feeding the massive flow
of the book's main course.
This is
a Big Book-and not just because you could stun an ox with
it. It makes a great metropolis and its cast of thousands
real in an idiom that makes questions of Englishness and Indianess
and authenticity seem silly and beside the point. The sheer,
unapologetic, unitalicised, ballsiness of the language is
one of the most purely enjoyable aspects of this extraordinary
book. The reader doesn't suspend disbelief: plausibility is
a small virtue: this epic novel gives its reader whole worlds
to inhabit.
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Anita
Roy
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Mukul
Kesavan
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Shoma
Chaudhury
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The Hutch Crossword
Book Award 2006 for English Non Fiction goes to...
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Two Lives
by Vikram Seth
About The Book :
Shanti Behari Seth was born on the eighth day of the eighth month
in the eighth year of the twentieth century; he died two years before
its close. He was brought up in India in the late years of the Raj,
and was sent by his family in the 1930s to Berlin-though he could
not speak a word of German-to study medicine and dentistry. It was
here, before he migrated to Britain, that Shanti's path first crossed
that of his future wife.
Henny Gerda Caro was also born in 1908, in Berlin, to a Jewish family,
cultured, patriotic and intensely German. When the family decided
to have Shanti as a lodger, Henny's first reaction was, 'Don't take
the black man!' But a friendship flowered, and when Henny fled Hitler's
Germany for England, just one month before the war broke out, she
was met at Victoria Station by the only person she knew in the country:
Shanti.
Vikram Seth has woven together their astonishing story: the war
that took Shanti to North Africa, the Middle East and the battle
of Monte Cassino, where his right arm was blown off; the persecution
that saw Henny desperately searching for news of the mother and
sister she had left behind; the love that sparked their marriage
in 1951; the courage that inspired Shanti to defy his injury and
set up once again in his profession; the arrival into this childless
couple's lives of their great-nephew from India-the teenage student,
Vikram Seth.
The result is an extraordinary tapestry of India, the Third Reich
and the Second World War, Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Israel and
Palestine, postwar Germany and 1970s Britain. Two Lives is both
a history of a violent country seen through the eyes of two survivors
as well as an intimate portrait of their friendship, marriage and
abiding yet complex love. Part biography, part memoir, part meditation
on our times, this is the true tale of two remarkable lives-a masterful
telling from one of our greatest living writers.
'When a book like Two Lives is written, the world regains a little
more humanity-and literature a lot more' -India Today
'Its telling is intensely personal . . . perhaps Seth's most engaging
and touching work' -Hindustan Times
'It needed a Seth to write this book. Only he, with his spare, lucid
prose . . . could have turned an affectionate family after-dinner
story into a "big book" memoir meant to be read by many. He has
proved, if proof were needed . . . that he is possibly the most
"international" of India's literary success stories' -Times of India
Abour Vikram Seth:
Vikram Seth was born in India and educated here and in England,
California and China. He has written acclaimed books in several
genres: verse novel, The Golden Gate; travel book, From Heaven Lake;
animal fables, Beastly Tales; epic novel, A Suitable Boy and his
most recent work is 'Two Lines' a memoir.
The Judges
1. Harsh Sethi: Harsh Sethi is presently consulting
editor of the monthly, Seminar.
He has earlier been assistant director, Indian Council of Social Science
Research; associate fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies, Delhi; editor 'Lokayan Bulletin; and acquisitions editor,
Sage Publications. Mr. Sethi has written extensively on the role and
development of voluntary organizations in India
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2. Mukund Padmanabhan: Mukund Padmanabhan is the Senior Associate
Editor of The Hindu. He oversees the newspaper's feature sections
-- the Sunday Magazine, The Literary Review and various editions of
MetroPlus and Friday Review, which are published as independent editions
in multiple centres. He also writes editorials and analytical articles
for the newspaper on legal and political subjects.
Mukund studied economics at the Madras Christian College before switching
to philosophy, which he studied at the University of Delhi and the
London School of Economics.
He taught philosophy briefly at The Hindu College in Delhi before
turning to journalism as a career. He worked as an Assistant Editor
in Newstime, Hyderabad, before moving to Calcutta to work as a Roving
correspondent for Sunday Magazine. He moved to Chennai in 1992, where
he worked for the Indian Express, which he left for The Hindu in 1997.
3. Rama Bijapurkar: Rama Bijapurkar is one of India's most
respected thought leaders on market strategy and consumer related
issues in India, and a keen commentator on social and cultural change
in the evolving, liberalizing India. She has her own market strategy
consulting practice and works with an impressive list of Indian and
global companies guiding the development of their business-market
strategies.
Rama's over 30 years of work experience includes leadership positions
with McKinsey & Company, MARG (India's pioneering market research
company, now AC Nielsen India), and full time consulting with Hindustan
Lever (Unilever India).
Rama is well published within and outside India on emerging market
and consumer related issues and has been frequently quoted in international
publications on emerging market issues. She also writes two widely
read columns for Economic Times and Business World, respectively,
India's largest circulating business newspaper and business magazine.
Written
in prose that is startling in its very simplicity, Vikram Seth's
Two Lives moves between genres with a quiet self-assurance. Part
biography, part memoir, part history and part random rumination,
this ambitious book encompasses the most extraordinary period in
20th century history by piecing together a story about two ordinary
people -- his uncle Shanti and his aunt Henny.
The most important
material for the book -- a cache of letters lying in a forgotten
trunk -- was discovered accidentally. It is a moving epistolary
record of the post-War years, which traces the tragic story of how
Aunt Henny's mother and sister were deported to Nazi concentration
camps and killed. The book is equally a story of courage and hope,
about how individuals, despite devastation being wrought on them,
reconstruct their lives, retain their humanity, and refuse to fall
prey to bitterness and recrimination. At a larger level, it reminds
us that historical truth is rarely better illumined than by showing
how common folk related to the momentous events of their day.
In honouring
Two Lives with the Hutch Crossword Book Award 2006, we recognise
an exquisitely written work of non-fiction that delicately traces
parallels between the personal and the external and explores the
intersection between lives and worlds
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Harsh
Sethi
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Mukund
Padmanabhan
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Rama
Bijapurkar
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Hutch Crossword Book Award
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