Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage wins the 2017 prize

Anuk Arudpragasam’s novel The Story of a Brief Marriage has won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize 2017.

A native of Colombo, his work, according to shortlist judge Arshia Sattar, “presents the civil war in Sri Lanka like never before. Writing from within the debris of Tamil lives in prose that can pierce your heart, Arudpragasam’s protagonists find dignity as they piece together strategies of survival. The story is about the human spirit in the most desperate of times. It sings not as testament of glory but as a dirge of despair.

Judges Kamila Shamsie, Rohini Mohan and Margaret Mascarenhas were unanimous in their decision.

“Anuk Arudpragasam has written an extraordinary novel that is timely, timeless and universal in its depiction of the possibility of tenderness and love blossoming in the midst of the mind-numbing carnage, suffering and horror that is war. The Story of a Brief Marriage is mesmerizing from the first paragraph, and remains delicately poised between life and death from beginning to end,” said Mascarenhas.

Shamsie added, “It’s an exceptional accomplishment for any writer - for a debut writer it’s near miraculous.”

Mohan, winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize 2015, for her own Sri Lanka-based novel The Seasons of Trouble, said, “Anuk has taken what is actually a sliver of a story, the briefest of moments, and suffused it with meaning. His spare, meditative writing lets the pain and delirium of conflict unfold, sometimes just through an injured bird.” 

Author and translator Sattar and poet and novelist Jeet Thayil chose this year’s Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize shortlist from forty-seven titles submitted for consideration.

Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize 2017 Shortlist

Prayaag Akbar, Leila (Simon & Schuster)

Hirsh Sawhney, South Haven (HarperCollins)

Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage (HarperCollins)

Sumana Roy, How I Became a Tree (Aleph Book Company)

Tripti Lahiri, Maid In India (Aleph Book Company)

Tejaswini Apte-Rahm, These Circuses that Sweep Through the Landscape (Aleph Book Company)

Author and translator Arshia Sattar and poet and novelist Jeet Thayil chose this year's Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize 2017 shortlist from forty-seven titles submitted for consideration.

Arshia Sattar writes

The Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize is ten years old this year and even a quick glance at previous winners will show that the Prize has celebrated writing across genre, gender, age and nation. Our oldest winner so far was in his 70s, and the Prize has been awarded to Pakistanis, to writers of both fiction and non-fiction, to men and to women. It has been a pleasure to acknowledge the wealth and diversity of South Asian writing in this last decade and a privilege to spotlight new writing.

This year’s shortlist of books and writers continues our commitment to finely-crafted writing and sophisticated thinking.

Prayaag Akbar’s Leila is the heart-breaking story of a lost child and a shattered society. Entirely dystopic, it haunts not simply because it presents us with a terrifying future but because that portrait of unfreedom, inequality and brutality seems to already be part of our lived reality.

Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree is an exquisite meditation on a personal decision to step away from a life that seemed to have everything but time. Roy shares what she has learned about and from trees through gentle essays that explore the natural world and reflect upon the human condition in the Anthropocene Age.

Writing from the point of view of a young boy whose voice has not broken but whose heart has, Hirsh Sawhney’s South Haven tells the poignant story of an immigrant family, its men unable to cope with the death of their mother and wife. Father and sons drift away from each other as they seek solace in new people, new ideas and new activities. But things fall apart and the centre cannot hold. Sawhney relies on the pathos of his characters to reach the persistent melancholia that so often succeeds the sharp grief of bereavement.

Maid in India by Tripti Lahiri eerily echoes Prayaag Akbar’s fictional dystopia as she goes deep into the multiple worlds that domestic workers inhabit. Lahiri also examines the employment and training agencies that keep the systems that supply and demand human beings well-oiled, and provides, in lucid prose devoid of emotional rhetoric, a picture of a society that thrives on entrenched structures of inequality.

Anuk Arudpragasam’s novel A Brief History of a Marriage presents the civil war in Sri Lanka like never before. Writing from within the debris of Tamil lives in prose that can pierce your heart, Arudpragasam’s protagonists find dignity as they piece together strategies of survival. The story is about the human spirit in the most desperate of times. It sings not as testament of glory but as a dirge of despair.

Tejaswini Apte-Rahm’s collection of short stories, These Circuses that Sweep Through the Landscape, is deceptively quiet in a literary world of noisy entries and exits. Alternately hyper and surreal, Apte-Rahm’s canvases are small. On them, her people and events are like ikons–they gleam with gilded details even as they occupy the darker recesses of contemporary life.

Together, this year’s books remind us that in an increasingly brutal and fragmented world, families, communities and societies no longer provide safety nets, that individuals often feel stranded on the brink of an abyss. And yet, it is through literature that we can search for each other, it is in writing that we can create meaning as a bulwark against the tides of untruth that thunder on our shores."

Judges Kamila Shamsie, Rohini Mohan and Margaret Mascarenhas will announce the winner in November.

This year’s judges

This year, we have an all-woman panel, a first for the tenth year of the prize.

Rohini Mohan won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize 2015, for her book The Seasons of Trouble (2014, Verso/Harper Collins), a non-fiction account of three people surviving the civil war in Sri Lanka. Rohini is an independent journalist writing on politics and human rights in South Asia, for publications including The New York Times, The Caravan, Al Jazeera, and The Hindu. She is based in Bangalore, India.

Kamila Shamsie is the author of seven novels, including Home Fire, which will be published in August 2017. Burnt Shadows has been translated into more than 20 languages and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and A God in Every Stone was shortlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. Three of her other novels (In the City by the Sea, Kartography, Broken Verses) have received awards from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and one of Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’, she grew up in Karachi, and now lives in London.

Margaret Mascarenhas is a transnational novelist, essayist and poet of Indian, Native American and French origin whose work focuses on pushing the boundaries of race , gender, genre and resistance. She is the author of the diasporic novels Skin, set in colonial India and The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos, set in Venezuela, where she grew up. She has published one volume of poetry and sketches, Triage — casualties of love and sex . She is currently working on a third novel , set partly in the Middle East, a collection of short stories and a second collection of poetry titled This is how you fix what is broken. She divides her time between Goa, India, and Ponte de Lima , Portugal.

The shortlist will be up in a few weeks and the judges’ decision will be out November-end.