DSC prize Longlist

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LONGLIST ANNOUNCED FOR THE DSC PRIZE FOR SOUTH ASIAN
LITERATURE 2018
16 novels including 4 translated works in contention for the coveted prize
New Delhi, October 10, 2018: The much anticipated longlist for the US $25,000 DSC Prize for South Asian
Literature 2018 was announced today by eminent historian and academic Rudrangshu Mukherjee, who is the
chair of the jury panel for the distinguished prize. The longlist of 16 novels which was unveiled at the Oxford
Bookstore in New Delhi includes 4 translated works where the original writings were in Assamese, Kannada,
Tamil and Hindi. The longlist features six women authors and three women translators, and two outstanding
debut novels that find place alongside the works of several established writers. The longlist represents the best
of South Asian fiction writing over the last year and includes submissions from a diverse mix of publishers and
authors of different backgrounds writing on a wide range of issues and themes. The novels include stunning
portrayals of migration, war and the pain of displacement, poignant love stories, the exploration of new found
relationships and identities, and vivification of the personal struggles, hopes and aspirations that symbolize the
urgent and divisive realities of contemporary South Asian life. Apart from authors based in South Asia there are
writers based outside the region who have incisively and evocatively brought alive the subtle nuances of South
Asian life and culture. The longlist announcement event was attended by publishers, authors and literary
enthusiasts who welcomed the selection of the longlist.
This year the DSC Prize, administered by the South Asian Literature Prize & Events Trust, received 88 eligible
entries and the five member international jury panel diligently went through these entries to arrive at this year’s
longlist of 16 novels which they feel represent the best works of fiction related to the South Asian region.

The longlisted entries contending for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2018 are:
 Anuradha Roy: All The Lives We Never Lived (Hachette, India)
 Arundhati Roy: The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness (Alfred Knopf, USA and Hamish Hamilton, Canada)
 Chandrakanta: The Saga Of Satisar (Translated by Ranjana Kaul, Zubaan Books, India)
 Deepak Unnikrishnan: Temporary People (Penguin Books, Penguin Random House, India)
 Jayant Kaikini: No Presents Please (Translated by Tejaswini Niranjana, Harper Perennial, HarperCollins
India)
 Jeet Thayil: The Book Of Chocolate Saints (Aleph Book Company, India and Faber & Faber, UK)
 Kamila Shamsie: Home Fire (Riverhead Books, USA and Bloomsbury, UK)
 Manu Joseph: Miss Laila Armed And Dangerous (Fourth Estate, HarperCollins, India)
 Mohsin Hamid: Exit West (Riverhead Books, USA and Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House, India)
 Neel Mukherjee: A State Of Freedom (Chatto & Windus, Vintage, USA and Hamish Hamilton, Penguin
Random House, India)
 Perumal Murugan: Poonachi (Translated by N Kalyan Raman, Context, Westland Publications, India)
 Prayaag Akbar: Leila (Simon & Schuster, India)
 Rita Chowdhury: Chinatown Days (Translated by Rita Chowdhury, Macmillan, Pan Macmillan, India)
 SJ Sindu: Marriage Of A Thousand Lies (Soho Press, USA)
 Sujit Saraf: Harilal & Sons (Speaking Tiger, India)
 Tabish Khair: Night Of Happiness (Picador, Pan Macmillan, India)

About the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature:
The US $25,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature which was instituted by Surina Narula and Manhad Narula
in 2010, is one of the most prestigious international literary awards specifically focused on South Asian writing.
It is a unique and coveted prize and is open to authors of any ethnicity or nationality as long as the writing is
about South Asia and its people. It also encourages writing in regional languages and translations and the prize
money is equally shared between the author and the translator in case a translated entry wins.
Now in its 8th year, the DSC Prize has been successful in bringing South Asian writing to a larger global audience
through rewarding and showcasing the achievements of the authors writing about this region. Past winners of
the DSC Prize have been H M Naqvi of Pakistan, Shehan Karunatilaka of Sri Lanka, Jeet Thayil and Cyrus Mistry
from India, American author of Indian origin Jhumpa Lahiri, Anuradha Roy from India, and Anuk Arudpragasam
of Sri Lanka who won the prize last year.
In line with its South Asian essence, the DSC Prize Award ceremony is held in various South Asian countries by
rotation. The winner of the DSC Prize 2015 was announced at the Jaipur Literature Festival in India, the winner
of the DSC Prize 2016 was announced at the Galle Literary Festival in Sri Lanka, the winner of the DSC Prize 2017
was announced at the Dhaka Lit Fest in Bangladesh, whereas the winner of the DSC Prize 2018 would be
announced in a South Asian country which is being finalized. For more information, visit: www.dscprize.com 

Another day and today see the longlist for the DSC prize for south Asian literature.I hope to read the four translated books on the longlist.

 

Shadow DSC prize winner

 

Well we have managed to read between Lisa ,Tara and myself to read all the shortlist and in the end had read forurteen books between us at least two or us had read the shortlised books.Not bad as we decide only just before christmas to do a shadow jury .Next year we will be more on the ball .

 

Shortlisted Authors:

• Bilal Tanweer: The Scatter Here is Too Great (Vintage Books/Random House, India)
• Jhumpa Lahiri: The Lowland (Vintage Books/Random House, India)
• Kamila Shamsie: A God in Every Stone (Bloomsbury, India)    
• Romesh Gunesekera: Noontide Toll (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin, India)       
• Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: The Mirror of Beauty (Penguin Books, India)

So we weight up the list which for me was very strong a couple of writers quite well known , one truly epic novel , one new name to me at least and a short story collection from a writer I really like .So i just managed to finish the fifthn book last night and have two more to review , so thankfully the winner we choose was a book I have reviewed .

We have chosen the Mirror of beauty for the first shadow DSC prize and it is the Epic The mirror of beauty by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi .I had this down as a favourite when the list came out as I had read the book before it came out here back in 2013 when the book had come out in Inida  here is my review .The book takes the life of the  mother of the poet Dagh , his mother Wazir Khanam life touches many in Mughal indian and we get a slice of the world at this time is this epic novel .We must also mention that it was run close in the shadow jury by Noontide toll  , we just felt this was maybe a book that lasts longer in the readers mind and soul .

have you read any books from the list ? would you like to take part next year?

Noontide Toll by Romesh Gunesekera

noontide toll

 

Noontide Toll by Romesh Gunesekera

Sri Lankan fiction

Source – review copy

 

I opened up the pathway of the heart
The flowers died embittered from the start
That night I crossed the bridge of sighs and I surrender

I looked back and glimpsed the outline of a boy
His life of sorrows now collapsing into joy
And tonight the stars are all aligned and I surrender

My mother cries beneath a southern sky and I surrender

I choose a David Slyvian lyric I surrender from his Dead bees on a cake album the somber mood is a bit like the book

Tonight I’m back with third book from this years DSC south asian prize shortlist and last before we announce the winner of shadow DSC prize , we managed to read all the books between us .Anyway back to Noontide Toll , I’ve long been a fan of Romesh Gunesekera ever since reef appeared on the Booker shortlist more than twenty years ago , this was also a book I had looked forward to reading , even thou it had taken a while for me to get to it , as I had loved one of his earlier short story collection Monkfish moon is my favourite book by him .I have reviewed him before his book The prisoner of paradise is also here

In the Tsunami of 2004 , the Galle cricket stadium was destroyed .Obviously , that was not all .Up and down the coast , thirty thousand people lost their lives .Whole towns in the south disappeared .The devastation was a bad as the war .Maybe only half as many people died or a third , but all in a day rather than over thirty years of human madness

Of course there was the damage of Tsunami as well as the civil war .as in the opening of the story shoot .

Noontide toll is one of those short story collections that could also be called a novel very easily it follows a collection of trips and people connected to a van driver called Vasantha , as he goes about his business as a driver and van , he is hired by various people and as we see them coming and going .This follows life returning to normal , if that is the word after the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka .The war saw the north trying to be a separate state from the south as the population in the north the Tamils formed a small percentage of the island and were always the underdogs .Anyway if the course of the book Vasantha starts in the south , in fact the stories is in two halves the first being the south and then as with the stories the second half is the north , seeing him visiting libraries destroyed by the war .elsewhere the past of britain is visited as some one goes to see Leonard Woolf’s house .

I hadn’t had any people from Holland in my van before .I liked these two .They might have been diplomats or from some funding agency , but they didn’t talk much .On our journey up ,I don’t think they said more than a dozen words each .But already they have picked up some local terms .

from the opening story folly, maybe title has more meaning ! but it sees the van taking people come to give money after the civil war .

I for one was shocked at the time there wasn’t more reported on the violent end of the Sri Lanka civil war , which saw the government after a number of years of Tamil tiger actions in the mid 2000 , finally launch an all out attack on the north which saw the fall of the Tamil tigers , but also 200,000 people displaced by this violent end to the conflict .I imagine for Romesh this was a hard book to write and get right , not be too one way or another but even as we find out in the book Vasantha could be any of us , he is an average Joe and even he can see how wrong near the end of the book what had happened in the final years of the civil war and the deep scars that are still there just under the surface ,possibly waiting to explode again ! As we spoke about this book , I was tuck by a point Lisa said about how easily forgotten events like this are and how some people may have not even been fully aware of what happened their .

Have you read any books by Romesh Gunesekera ?

The lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

The lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

Indian fiction

Source – Review copy

 

 

Boy, you’re going to carry that weight,
Carry that weight a long time
Boy, you’re going to carry that weight
Carry that weight a long time

I never give you my pillow
I only send you my invitations
And in the middle of the celebrations
I break down

I choose this Beatles lyric because sometime we do have to carry a weight for a family member

Well I ‘m going back here to late 2013 to review this book , I had a quick reread of it in bits over the weekend .I decide to finally review it because Lisa had ask me to join her in doing a Shadow Jury for the DSC south asian book prize , which I said yes as I had read two this book and Mirror of beauty (longest book on the list ) , I also had Noon tide toll on my shelves and could order another from Library leaving me one book to get when Amanda gets paid in a couple of weeks just before the prize .It’s nice to be judging with Lisa and Tara  .Now why didn’t I review this book , well it wasn’t that I didnt’ like it far from it was good but not stand out enough to be saved from Mount unreviewed .I had read Lahiri before both her short story collections , I was always nervous that her style wouldn’t work on the change from short story writer  to Novelist .Anyway to the book at last

So many times Subhash and Udayan had walked across the lowland .It was a shortcut to a field on the outskirts of the neighbourhood ,where they went to play football ,Avoiding puddles and stepping over mats of hyacinth leaves that remained in place .Breathing the dank Air

From opening page that gives rise to the book’s title the Lowland ,si near where the boys grew up .

The lowland is a classic story in many ways , a story of two brothers growing up , but also growing apart as they do so .Now the two brothers Udayan and Subhash , split apart from each other  one drawn into a world of politics the other drawn into a life far away from the India they grew up in .The brother drawn to Poltics Udayan is drawn to this protest at the poverty with in the country , this is 1967 and they are just following what had happened elsewhere in the world , but will it have a lasting effect on his life and his family , to a young wife and his parents .Meanwhile his brother Subhash has left to study in the but a moment of madness means , he comes home marries his brothers now widowed wife and returns with her to America , leading to a knock on for the next generation and the parents .

He was unwell ?

He was killed .

How ?

The paramilitary shot shot him .He was a Naxalite .

I’m sorry .It’s a terrible loss to bear .But no you’ll be a father .Yes .

Listen it’s been too long ,Why don’t you and your wife come to dinner one day .

Just after he lost his brother Subhash back in the US

Well The  lowlands , takes a classic story of brothers going  on different paths in their lives  .Then throws into it a real  event from  Indian history” the Naxalite cause “and the protest around that time .Brings this vast story down to the family level and looks at how politics ,l families and loyalty to ones loved ones .I loved that Lahiri managed to capture in a novel what she does so well in her stories and that is the interpersonal relationships between people on a daily level .At the core the brothers and the way the lives diverge but also cross each other again after one event leaving one gone and another with a new life and direction .I ‘m not sure it is the winner of the prize but it deserves it place on the DSC shortlist .

Have you read this book ?