Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing wins Sushila Devi Literature Award

Yay! https://t.co/pwvJMvNQRN

— Shubhangi Swarup (@shubhangisapien) January 2, 2020

Swarup in her ambitious novel traverses time and space to craft a novel about climate, longing and love. A review in The Indian Express states, “The book can be said to be loosely composed of four novellas, and the characters at the heart of the story are Girija Prasad and Chanda Devi — two people with startlingly different perspectives towards life, brought together thanks to a godman throwing a banana peel. Of course, while that might have been the immediate causal event, Chanda tells Girija that they came together in that lifetime as they did in so many earlier ones. That doesn’t make their discovery of each other any quicker,” adding, “Nothing in the book is set in stone — not even stone itself. Rain, tsunami, earthquakes, mountains that sink and peaks that grow — all serve to indicate that change (chaos) is constant. Things are born anew even as others return to an earth that is covered in faultines, with tectonic plates ever shifting and rumbling.”

Last year, Namita Gokhale was awarded with the Sushila Devi Literature Award for her work Things to Leave Behind.