JCB Prize for Literature: Translations shine once again in the longlist

The JCB Prize for Literature, an award celebrating India’s literary excellence, has unveiled its sixth edition’s longlist. This year, the jury received entries from from 24 cities, with authors writing in eight languages, including English. Besides three debut novelists, the longlist also features four translations from Bengali, Hindi and Tamil. 

The annual award honours an exceptional fictional book by an Indian author. The 2022 winner was The Paradise of Food by Khalid Jawed, translated from Urdu by Baran Farooqi.

Also read: JCB Prize 2022: The Paradise of Food, an Urdu novel in English, wins

This year’s longlist is a “dynamic reflection of Indian fiction at its finest" states Mita Kapur, literary director, JCB Prize for Literature, in a press release. Kapur adds that the ten books are “bound to captivate, surprise and delight every reader who picks it up."

This year, authors, Manoranjan Byapari and Perumal Murugan whose works have been longlisted for the Prize twice in the past, make an appearance in the nominations for a third time with The Nemesis and Fire Bird, respectively. Author Tanuj Solanki joins the list for the second time with Manjhi’s Mayhem.

Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, also longlisted in the past, returns a translator for Manoj Rupda’s Hindi book, I Named My Sister Silence. This is Shekhar’s first translation of a book. The jury has hailed it as a novel of “epic stature told with great beauty and brevity", and that its power can be felt viscerally in Shekhar’s translation. “The complex and emotionally wrenching relationship between the protagonist and his sister is at the heart of it, making this perhaps the most layered among many novels about sibling relationships," they add in the press note.

Geet Chaturvedi’s debut book, Simsim, translated from Hindi by Anita Gopalan, also joins the list. The book centres around the undocumented Sindhi experience of losing one’s home. “It goes beyond simple elegy and nostalgia, connecting past with present, remembering with forgetting," the jury says in a public statement. This is Gopalan’s first foray into fiction translation.

Two debut writings include Tejaswini Apte-Rahm’s The Secret of More and Bikram Sharma’s writing debut, The Colony of Shadows. The longlist of 2023 also includes The East Indian by Brinda Charry, Everything the Light Touches by Janice Pariat, and Mansur by Vikramjit Ram.

“Every member of the jury found something special about these ten books. Taken together they represent a fine sampling of the breadth and quality of Indian novels published in English over the last year," states Srinath Perur, chair, jury, in the press note.

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The shortlist of five titles will be unveiled on the 20 October. The winner, who will be declared on 18 November, will receive a cash prize of ₹ 25 lakh. If the winning work is a translation, the translator will receive an additional cash prize of ₹ 10 lakh. Furthermore, each of the five shortlisted authors will receive ₹ 1 lakh; and if the shortlisted work is a translation, the translator will receive ₹ 50,000.

Also read: The Secret of More review: Business as art, and art as business