First Rate

Mridula Koshy has won this year’s Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize for her collection of short stories,If It is Sweet (Westland-Tranquebar). Receiving an award in memory of a friend could be bittersweet,but it isn’t for Koshy. “I view the award separate from my friendship with Shakti. The award is a wonderful way to honour her memory,” she says,“I still talk to Shakti in my head,about my writing. She was the first person who encouraged me to take writing seriously.”

Koshy,34,has won a cash prize of Rs 1 lakh and a trophy. The contenders were Arzee the Dwarf by Chandrahas Choudhury,The Hotel at the End of the World by Parismita Singh,Eunuch Park by Palash Krishna Mehrotra,Baulsphere by Mimlu Sen,and An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy. The judges were novelist Rana Dasgupta,editor Mukund Padmanabhan and writer/filmmaker Arshia Sattar. The first Shakti Bhatt Prize went to Mohammed Hanif for A Case of Exploding Mangoes in 2008. Koshy will be awarded the prize at the British Council,Delhi,on December 14.