Awards, awards, awards

The Giller Prize shortlist was announced a few days ago: Shauna Singh Baldwin, Alice Munro, Wayson Choy, Pauline Holdstock, Paul Quarrington and Miriam Toews made the cut.

Nearer home, The New India Foundation has been busy–so busy, in fact, that they don’t seem to have updated their website. Tch tch.

Outlook reports: “…The foundation is also awarding a Rs 1 lakh prize for the best non-fiction book. It’s a mixed bag on the shortlist, with a Dalit autobiography and a travelogue competing with academic works. The shortlisted books: Jootan: A Dalit’s Life (Samya) by Omprakash Valmiki; Out of God’s Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land (Penguin) by Dom Moraes and Sarayu Ahuja; Dalit Assertion and the Unfinished Democratic Revolution: the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh (Sage) by Sudha Pai; Locked in Place: State-building and late industrialisation in India (Tulika) by Vivek Chibber; and Contesting Marginality: Ethnicity, Insurgency and Subnationalism in Northeast India (Manohar) by Sajal Nag. The award and fellowships will be announced at a special lecture meet at Delhi’s IIC on December 3.”

And one of the unwritten requirements to qualify clearly was the presence of a semicolon somewhere in a long and meandering title. You sense that Jootan: A Dalit’s Life is almost distressingly terse.

On a lighter note, if you’re Indian, convinced that you write better stories than Seth, Rushdie and Lahiri put together, but haven’t yet put your talent where your mouth is, this Bombay blog’s running a fiction contest. Please note that Caferati only wants entries via email, so if your manuscript is written in copperplate across twenty-seven violet-scented onionskin pages, start typing.