Prized Writers

The Vodafone Crossword Book Awards 2008 were distributed in Mumbai on Thursday. The award for the Best Book in English Fiction was shared by Neel Mukherjee’s Past Continuous and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies. Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer won the Best Book in the English Nonfiction category,while Ira Pande’s translation of Manohar Shyam Joshi’s T’Ta Professor was awarded the Best Book in the Indian Language Fiction Translation category. Usha K.R.,Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Mukund Padmanabhan judged fiction,Harsh Sethi,Jerry Rao and Jyotirmaya Sharma nonfiction and Arunava Sinha,Dilip Kumar and Rita Kothari the translation category. The awards carry a prize of Rs 3 lakh each. The Popular Book Award,determined by readers voting online for their favourite book shortlisted in the fiction and nonfiction categories,was won by Pallavi Aiyar’s Smoke & Mirrors: An Experience of China.