The inaugural Armory Square Prize runs into controversy; withholds declaring winner

On April 12, two days after Krishnan had submitted the additional material, the jury withdrew the award by mail, writing that the Armory Square Prize has “reassessed the content of the work and its potential to survive the editorial and publication process of the Prize’s affiliated partners, considering the new excerpts… and determined that certain themes in the author’s work and certain references could potentially expose the AS Prize, its financial sponsors and affiliated partners to criticism, reputational risk, and potential liability.”

Book cover of Raasa Leela. (Photo: Amazon)

Krishnan, who was also shortlisted for Sajjad Haider Yaldram’s Urdu short story collection, Save Me From My Friends, co-translated into English with Jaweeda Habeeb, has withdrawn both works from consideration. “It would be an embarrassment to be associated with an award with such little integrity,” she says, adding that the jury has not responded to her emails after withdrawing the award.

“There was no apology to me either,” she says, “and there were attempts instead to lay it all on me. The tone is ‘in the light of the new evidence we have’, although what they have truly indulged in is preemptive censorship. [Every objection] they mentioned while withdrawing the award was in the very application they used to judge me as the winner. The passages I have sent are really all that have to do with sex. Much of the book is about the protagonist Perumal’s struggle in bureaucracy and life because of his caste and lack of education… Nivedita and I, neither of whom have been published outside India before, were even willing to accommodate their requests for editing should the novel require them.” Nivedita was not contacted by the jury.

Charu Nivedita (Photo: Charu Nivedita)

The award is in its inaugural year and announced its shortlist of seven books, across five languages including Urdu, Tamil, Hindi, Assamese and Sri Lankan Tamil, on April 3. Excerpts of the shortlisted works will be published online by Words Without borders, who declined to comment on the award’s withdrawal from Krishnan. Open Letter Books, set to publish the full-length winning work next year, did not respond to requests for comment. The jury, comprising luminary writers and translators Jason Grunebaum (chair), Daisy Rockwell, Shahnaz Habib, Anton Hur, Arunava Sinha and Jeffrey Zuckerman, and Pia Sawhney, partner at Armory Square Ventures, also did not respond to requests for comment.

Update: After the publication of this article, the AS Prize issued a note on their website, which can be accessed in full here: https://www.armorysv.com/a-note-about-the-prize

📣 For more lifestyle news, follow us on Instagram | Twitter | Facebook and don’t miss out on the latest updates!