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.