Deepak Unnikrishnan bagged the coveted The Hindu Prize 2017 for his ode to the ‘pravasi’ Malayalee - ‘Temporary People’. Receiving his award from British novelist and journalist Sebastian Faulks, Mr. Unnikrishnan said, “For me, it was really important to document people like my parents in the Gulf, who worked hard for their children. One reason this award feels important to me is, because of the eminent names along with mine in the shortlist.”
Temporary People is one part dystopia and one part nostalgia; it’s the brutal dashing of hopes of every aspirant pravasi . Set mainly in the 90s and earlier, the stories are about those who made the UAE what it is now, the good and the bad.
Here is the review of Mr. Unnikrishnan's book
The jury comprised Ananya Vajpeyi, Chandan Gowda, Gauri Viswanathan, Jonathan Gil Harris, Kamini Mahadevan.
The Hindu Prize 2017 shortlist had five books - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy, Leila by Prayaag Akbar, The Small Town Sea by Anees Salim, Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan, and When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy.
Renowned Tamil writer and playwright and Indira Parthasarathy received The Hindu Tamil Lifetime Achievement Award from N Ravi, Publisher of The Hindu Group of Newspapers.
Receiving the award, the Sahitya Akademi and Sangeet Natak Akademi award winner said, “I feel honoured to receive this award, and feel we are honouring the Tamil language. By honouring Tamil, we are honouring ourselves as well. It is the only language which is still spoken with unbroken continuity.”
Women ruled the roost at The Hindu Young World-Goodbooks Awards. The award for Best Picture Book - Story was given to Chatura Rao for Gone Grandmother . Thanking her Editor Priya Krishnan and the illustrator Krishna Bala Shenoi, she said, “We need to encourage children to ask more and more questions.”
Nancy Raj bagged the Best Picture book- Illustrations award for her work Maharani the Cow . “Illustrations are an art by itself, they are hidden within the covers of a book,” she observed.
