Fabulist writer Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih wins Shakti Bhatt award
Nongkynrih is a veteran poet, fictioneer, and critic, who has often drawn from the folk tales and legends of Khasi tribe.
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His latest novel The Distaste of the Earth was recently longlisted for the prestigious JCB Prize for Literature 2024. (Express) The latest edition of the Shakti Bhatt award has gone to Meghalayan writer Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih. Known for writing about his tribe, Khasi, and his hometown, Sohra, described in his novel Funeral Nights (2021) as “the wettest desert on earth”, his latest novel The Distaste of the Earth was recently longlisted for the prestigious JCB Prize for Literature 2024.
The prize, started in 2008, in memory of the late editor and writer Shakti Bhatt, is awarded for a writer’s body of work. Nongkynrih is a veteran poet, fictioneer, and critic, who has often drawn from the folk tales and legends of his tribe, without being limited to “facile parochialism”, in the words of poet Arundhathi Subramaniam in a Poetry International essay. She adds, “He regards Khasi as the language of his tribe and English as the language that enables him to reject isolationism”.
Book covers of ‘Late Blooming Cherries’ and ‘Around the Hearth’. (Photos from Amazon books and Google books)
The story of Manik Raitong The Wretched and queen Lieng Makaw has found its way into multiple works by Nongkynrih, particularly Around the Hearth, a treatise on folktales of the region. It goes that Manik, an orphan outcasted from society, falls in love with a princess but is rejected by her family due to the nature of his birth. Heartbroken, he consigns himself to the outskirts yet again and walks around with a flute, his lone companion, until the now-queen rediscovers him many years later. Around the Hearth traces the lineage of stories – about gods, nature and humanity – that have animated Nongkynrih’s tribe long before Thomas Jones, a Christian missionary, brought in the Roman script in 1842 and began forming the Khasi script.
Book cover by “Funeral Nights'(Photo: Amazon books)
The author is the co-editor of Late-Blooming Cherries: Haiku Poetry from India and Dancing Earth; An Anthology of Poetry from Northeast India. He has also published poetry on platforms like Wasafiri and PEN International, and has been anthologised The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets.
He teaches at the North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong.
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