Press Release: Prizes and Awards
Constable & Robinson Author Wins Indian 'Booker' Prize
Posted at 6:51PM Tuesday 28 Jul 2009
Neel Mukherjee has won the Vodafone Crossword Award for fiction (otherwise known as the Indian 'Booker') for his mesmerizing début Past Continuous. The prize was shared with Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies), who was being touted as favourite to come away with prize. This year's shortlist included The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie, Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri and An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy.Andreas Campomar, who bought the book from Peter Straus at Rogers, Coleridge and White late last year, said 'When I started to read Neel's book, I knew that I was 'sailing in first-class waters', to borrow a phrase from Isaiah Berlin. And this has been borne out by Neel winning India's foremost fiction prize. I am extremely pleased for him. He is a one-off talent, an international star in the making, who promises to have a very successful writing career.' Past Continuous will be published under a new title, A Life Apart, in hardback (£12.99) on January 28th, 2010. The judges' citation was as follows: 'The Vodafone Crossword Award fiction goes to Past Continuous by Neel Mukherjee, an ambitious work that takes liberties with form and structure in a manner both startling and compelling. The story follows Ritwik, a young man who attempts to escape a life of deprivation and abuse in his native Calcutta for a better life in London but finds that the legacy of cruelty has been interred fatally in his bones. Written with unrelenting honesty, the narrative confronts the larger questions of human frailty, the conflicted will to debasement and the strange manifestations of love. With remarkable skill, Past Continuous simultaneously brings to life a story within a story – the experience of a minor character in a classic by Tagore, which it cleverly ties up with the life of the protagonist, giving us an insight into the possibilities of fiction as artifice and language as form.' The Vodafone Crossword Book Award, previously known as the Hutch Crossword Book Award, is India's premier literary award and recognises and rewards the best of Indian writing in English. Previous winners include Vikram Chandra for Sacred Games, Salman Rushdie for Shalimar the Clown, Vikram Seth (twice: in the fiction category for An Equal Music and in the non-fiction category for Two Lives) and Amitav Ghosh (for The Hungry Tide). About the author Neel Mukherjee was born in Calcutta and educated in Calcutta, Oxford, and Cambridge. He reviews fiction for The Times and Time Magazine Asia and has written for the TLS, the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the New York Times, the Boston Review, the Sunday Telegraph and Biblio. He is also a contributing editor to Boston Review. He lives in London. A Life Apart is his first novel.
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