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Home » Blog » The JCB Prize for Literature presents its 2022 winner and shortlisted authors in a series of panel discussions at the Jaipur Literature Festival

The JCB Prize for Literature presents its 2022 winner and shortlisted authors in a series of panel discussions at the Jaipur Literature Festival

January 2023, Jaipur: India’s richest literary award, the JCB Prize for Literature, presents a special series of discussions at the 2023 Jaipur Literature Festival, offering the audience a dive into the novels that comprised the JCB Prize for Literature’s Shortlist this year. Back at the festival for the fifth consecutive year the Prize will showcase the winning author and translator of the 2022 Prize and the shortlisted authors and translators, Chuden Kabimo, Sheela Tomy, Manoranjan Byapari and Arunava Sinha. Moderated by Literary Director Mita Kapur, the session will shed light on the beginnings and endings of the novels, and the writers’ own thoughts and processes in creating
those.
The second session will focus on the 2022 JCB Prize for Literature winner The Paradise of Food, where author Khalid Jawed and translator Baran Farooqi will be in conversation with Pragya Tiwari, about the novel, their partnership and on winning the JCB Prize for Literature. The JCB Prize’ most diverse shortlist yet, comprising of five translations from Urdu, Hindi, Bangla, Nepali and Malayalam will also be available at the Jaipur Literature Festival Bookstore, for readers to pick up and get them signed by the authors post the sessions.

The list of sessions are as follows:
21 st January Saturday (3PM onwards)

The Paradise of Food:

Khalid Jawed and Baran Farooqi in conversation with Pragya Tiwari (Journalist)
22 nd January Sunday (12PM onwards)

Beginning and Endings:

Chuden Kabimo, Sheela Tomy, Arunava Sinha and Manoranjan Byapari in conversation with Mita
Kapur

Speaking on the occasion, Mita Kapur, Literary Director, The JCB Prize for Literature stated, “The JCB Prize has been associated with the Jaipur Literature Festival for the past five years. The festival provides a substantial platform to the finest of contemporary fiction that India has to offer to a wide spectrum of audiences both nationally and internationally. We are delighted and very proud to present the JCB Prize’s shortlisted authors and translators along with the winner for 2022 at the festival.”

The JCB Prize for Literature celebrates excellence in Indian writing.  It is presented each year to a distinguished work of fiction by an Indian writer, as selected by the jury. The Prize encourages translations and aims to introduce new audiences to works of Indian literature written in languages other than their own.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS:

Khalid Jawed is one of the leading Urdu novelists today. He is the author of fifteen works of fiction and non-fiction, and is a recipient of the Katha Award, the Upendranath Ashk Award and the UP Urdu Academy Award. He is a professor at Jamia Millia Islamia University. His book Paradise of Food has won the JCB Prize for Literature 2022.

Baran Farooqi is a professor of English at Jamia Millia Islamia University. Baran Farooqi is Shamsur Rahman Farooqi’s younger daughter. She is the winner for the JCB Prize for Literature 2022. Her areas of special interest are Shakespeare, Translation, and Women’s Studies. She has translated extensively from Urdu into English. She is the acclaimed translator of The Colours of My Heart, a selection of poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Pragya Tiwari is a journalist who has written extensively on politics, identity, policy, and culture and has edited several publications including, Tehelka, The Big Indian Picture, and Vice. She currently works as a policy and culture consultant and is also the Creative Director of Oijo Media and co-founder of the Indian History Collective.

Mita Kapur is the founder and CEO of Siyahi, India’s leading literary consultancy. Her first book, The F-Word, is a food book, memoir and travelogue. She has edited Chillies and Porridge: Writing Food, an anthology of essays on food. As a freelance journalist, she writes regularly for different newspapers and magazines on social and development issues along with travel, food and lifestyle.

Mita has received many awards, including the Karamveer Puruskar (2009) for her work as a journalist in creating social awareness and for being the best literary consultant in the country, the Maharani Gayatri Devi Award for Woman of Excellence (2014), and the Femina Women Super Achiever Award (2018) at the World HRD Congress. She curated Masala Chowk, a food court for street food in Jaipur in 2018, and was a member of the executive council for Jawahar Kala Kendra from November 2016 – October 2018. She is also the producer for Mountain Echoes – The Bhutan festival of Art, Literature and Culture, the Woman Up! Summit, and Soul Connect Experiences.

Manoranjan Byapari was born in 1950 in East Pakistan. After he migrated to West Bengal at the age of three, he lived in two refugee camps before he moved away at the age of fourteen to work. At twenty-four, he became politically active with the Naxals after meeting famous labour activist Shankar Guha Niyogi. In and out of prison, he held various jobs over the years: cook, porter, chandal (corpse- burner in a crematorium). In prison, he taught himself to read. He learnt and practiced writing with a twig in the dirt in the jail courtyard. During this time, he developed a great passion for literature. Later, when he was working as a rickshaw puller, he had a chance encounter with Mahasweta Devi, who asked him to contribute to her journal Bartika. He has since then published eight novels, four volumes of memoirs and over fifty short stories. His essay ‘Is there Dalit writing in Bangla?’ which was translated into English by Meenakshi Mukerjee for Economic and Political Weekly launched him into mainstream prominence.

He worked until recently as a cook with the Helen Keller Institute for the Deaf and Blind in West Bengal. He won the 2019 Hindu Prize for Non-Fiction for his autobiography Itibritte Chandal Jiban (translated into English as Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit). Byapari’s writings aim not to evoke guilt or sympathy, but to reclaim the rights denied to large sections of the Indian population.

Sheela Tomy is a novelist and short-story writer from Kerala. Tomy bagged the Cherukad Award for Malayalam Literature 2021 for her debut novel Valli. The English translation of Valli was shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature in 2022 and Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize 2022. Her newest novel, Aa Nadiyodu Preu Chodikkaruth (Do Not Ask the River Her Name), addresses the theme of people under siege.

Arunava Sinha translates Bengali fiction and nonfiction into English. Fifty-one of his translations have been published so far. Twice the winner of the Crossword translation award for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), respectively, he has also won the Muse India translation award (2013) for Buddhadeva Bose’s When the Time is Right. He has been nominated for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Best Translated  Book award in the US. He is a recipient of an English PEN translation grant for
Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s The Yogini. Besides India, his translations have been published in the UK, the US, and in several European and Asian countries. He has conducted workshops at the British Centre for Literary Translation, UEA; University of Chicago; Dhaka Translation Centre; and Jadavpur University. He is an associate professor of practice in the Creative Writing department at Ashoka University.

Chuden Kabimo is an Indian writer writing in Nepali. His debut book 1986, a collection of short stories, won the Aashrani Rai Smriti Puraskar in 2017 and the Yuwa Sahitya Akademi Puraskar in 2018. Kabimo’s novel Faatsung has been translated into English, Bengali and Hindi and published in India, Nepal and the UK. The English translation of Faatsung- Song of the Soil, was shortlisted for the JCB Prize 2022.

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