The Write Stuff

Michael Worton, Emeritus Professor at University College London.

The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2015 has announced the names for its five-panel jury. To be chaired by eminent poet and writer Keki N Daruwalla, the panel for the fifth-edition of the award includes John Freeman, author, literary critic and former editor of Granta from the US, Maithree Wickramasinghe, a Professor of English at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka and the University of Sussex, Razi Ahmed from Pakistan who is the founding director of the annual, not-for-profit Lahore Literary Festival (LLF), and Michael Worton, Emeritus Professor at UCL (University College London) who has written extensively on modern literature and art.

“This year we had 75 different voices both from the South Asia region and from other countries ranging from the USA, Canada and the UK to France, South Africa and New Zealand,” said Professor Worton. “Being a member of the DSC Prize jury has so far been both exhilarating and exhausting. Exhilarating because of the excellence, the range and the sheer excitement of the fiction that we have had to read; exhausting because the timetable meant that we had to read 75 works of fiction in three months.”

The short-list for the award will be announced on November 27 in London, and the winner of the US $50,000 cash prize will be announced at the Jaipur Literature Festival on January 22, next year. The 2014 award went to Cyrus Mistry for Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer (Aleph, Rs 495).

“South Asia with its crowds, their emotions spilling over spit-slick streets, and its roller coaster histories dotted with a coup and an insurgency here or an assassination there is a seed-bed for good fiction. The best part of the DSC Prize is that translations also get a look-in,” said Daruwalla.