Amitav Ghosh and Jeet Thayil are among the 16 writers on the longlist for the $50,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature announced here on Tuesday.
Ghosh has been selected for River of Smoke; and Thayil for his debut novel Narcopolis.
Other prominent names from the subcontinent include Mohammed Hanif (Pakistan), and Tahmina Anam (Bangladesh).
The winner from a shortlist, to be revealed next month, will be announced at the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2013.
The jury, chaired by K. Satchidanandan, said the list represented “the richness and variety of fiction written around the life of South Asians or people of South Asian origin within and outside their own countries.”
Mr. Satchidanandan said the jury was “excited by the unprecedented response” from publishers. There were 81 entries from around the world “charmingly diverse in their theme and treatment and well aware of the political, cultural and psychological dimensions of life in the societies and people they were dealing with.”
“The values we were looking for in the works were many: novelty of theme, freshness of the narrative strategies used as well as the idiom, the contribution the work makes to the genre of the novel in general. And we found several works which had one or all of these qualities,” he said.
Here’s the full list:
Jamil Ahmad ( The Wandering Falcon ); Alice Albinia ( Leela’s Book ); Tahmima Anam ( The Good Muslim ); Rahul Bhattacharya ( The Sly Company of People Who Care ); Roopa Farooki ( The Flying Man ); Musharraf Ali Farooqi ( Between Clay and Dust ); Amitav Ghosh ( River of Smoke ); Niven Govinden ( Black Bread White Beer ); Sunetra Gupta ( So Good in Black ); Mohammed Hanif ( Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ); Jerry Pinto:( Em and the Big Hoom ); Uday Prakash ( The Walls of Delhi translated by Jason Grunebaum ); Anuradha Roy ( The Folded Earth ); Saswati Sengupta ( The Song Seekers ); Geetanjali Shree ( The Empty Space translated by Nivedita Menon ; and Jeet Thayil ( Narcopolis )
