Here is all that you need to know about the ten books on the JCB Prize for Literature longlist in 2023.
The JCB Prize for Literature announced its longlist for 2023 on September 2nd. 2023 marks the sixth year after the prize’s foundation in 2018. This year’s longlist of ten titles includes four translations and six books written originally in English. There are both debut authors and veterans, with Manoranjan Byapari and Perumal Murugan, featuring for the third time on this list.
The prize is funded by the construction manufacturing group JCB, with the aim to recognize and reward distinguished works by Indian authors in English or works translated into English. The prize awards fetes writers as well as translators in case of translated works. The prize money amounts to ₹2,500,000 for the winning author and ₹10,00,000 for the translator (wherever applicable).
This year’s longlist includes:
- 1. The Secret of More by Tejaswini Apte-Rahm
- 2. The Nemesis by Manoranjan Byapari (translated by V Ramaswamy)
- 3. The East Indian by Brinda Charry
- 4. Simsim by Geet Chaturvedi (translated by Anita Gopalan)
- 5. Fire Bird by Perumal Murugan (translated by Janani Kannan)
- 6. Everything the Light Touches: A Novel by Janice Pariat
- 7. Mansur: A Novel by Vikramajit Ram
- 8. I Named My Sister Silence by Manoj Rupda (translated by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar)
- 9. The Colony of Shadows by Bikram Sharma
- 10. Manjhi's Mayhem by Tanuj Solanki
1. The Secret of More by Tejaswini Apte-Rahm
Genre: historical fiction
Page count: 455
Publishing house: Aleph Book Company (05 September, 2022)
Tejaswini Apte-Rahm’s debut novel is a work of historical fiction set in colonial Bombay. The newly orphaned Tatya arrives in Bombay in pursuit of business. Hardworking, ambitious and enterprising, he goes from dream to dream, seizing Bombay’s profit and promise to establish a business empire. Failures hardly hinder him. He marries the 12-year-old Radha, who would, it was predicted of her, bring great wealth. Radha’s domestic life runs parallel to Tatya’s narrative, as she raises and cares for her children and her household in a city caught in the turmoils of rapid modernization.
Secret of More is a thoroughly researched and richly detailed book that moves through the bustle and glamour of Bombay’s industries–fabric, film, and foundries. Tatya revels in his success but is forever hounded by a sense of unfulfillment. Tejaswini Apte-Rahm is a writer from Mumbai. She has published a collection of short stories and co-authored a book on environmental education for children.
2. The Nemesis by Manoranjan Byapari (translated by V Ramaswamy)
Genre: Semi-Autobiography
Page count: 390
Publishing house: Westland Publications Limited (06 February, 2023)
In the second installment in the Chandal Jibon trilogy, Manoranjan Byapari’s The Nemesis, we once again follow Jibon as he finds himself in Kolkata, trying to pick up the threads of his life with his parents and siblings. Jibon works as a cook’s assistant and hides his caste. Written with his trademark cutting and enraged prose, Byapari, an MLA and a vocal writer from the Dalit community in West Bengal, lays bare the social injustices faced by the pariah namasudras despite the guarantees of equality by the Indian Constitution.
The Nemesis documents bloody chapters of Bengali history: the Naxal movement of the 60s, which saw violent clashes between the state machinery and the tribal, peasant leaders and radical communists, as well as the influx of refugees into West Bengal following the Bangladesh Liberation War in the 70s.
Byapari is a Bengali novelist, essayist and short-fiction writer. He has been included in the list of books selected for consideration by the JCB prize twice before. He has won multiple awards, including the Hindu Literary Prize and the Shakti Bhatt Prize. V. Ramaswamy is a Kolkata-based activist, translator and non-fiction writer.
3. The East Indian by Brinda Charry
Genre: Historical fiction
Page count: 272
Publishing house: Scribe Publications Pty Limited (02 May, 2023)
Born to a Tamil courtesan, Tony is taken into an Englishman’s service after his mother’s death. Things quickly go out of hand as he is kidnapped from London’s crowded streets and transported to work in Virginia’s tobacco plantations as an indentured labourer. Tony is passed on from one White master to another, all the while nursing his dream of becoming a doctor.
Brinda Charry’s The East Indian is an elaborate imagination of the life of the first recorded Indian in the British colonies of North America. While the real man is barely a footnote in history, with nothing known of him beyond his name, The East Indian is a sprawling Dickensian yarn about the meanings of friendship, otherness, and home. Throughout his journeys, Tony encounters many more othered people, such as enslaved black Africans and Native Americans. Tony himself continues to inhabit a racially ambiguous position – neither black nor American Indian – and therefore cannot be comfortably situated in the new social hierarchy of America.
A historian who specializes in the English Renaissance, Brinda Charry has published two novels and a collection of short stories. She also has several works written in the field of her academic specialization.
4. Simsim by Geet Chaturvedi (translated by Anita Gopalan)
Genre: Literary fiction
Page count: 248
Publication house: Penguin Random House India Private Limited (February 2023)
Simsim is a book-length meditation on memory and loss. Basar Mal is a Sindhi Hindu who lost his homeland during the Partition of India. Exiled and harboring no chance of ever returning, he keeps the memory of Sindh alive as he starts a library where he will preserve the language and the culture of his home.
The second narrative follows a young graduate in 2007 who clashes with his father over his dreams and falls in love with a girl’s face at a window. On top of that, the Mumbai land mafia is targeting Basar Mal for the vast tract of land his library stands upon.
Geet Chaturvedi is one of the most widely read contemporary writers in Hindi. A poet, a novelist, and an essayist, his works have been translated into 22 languages. He has received numerous literary prizes, including the Vatayan International Literature Award and the Syed Haider Raza fellowship for fiction. Anita Gopalan is a writer and translator. In 2016, she received the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant.
Also Read: Uncover the Best 12 Books on the Indian Partition
5. Fire Bird by Perumal Murugan (translated by Janani Kannan)
Genre: Literary fiction
Page count: 304
Publishing house: India Hamish Hamilton (17 November, 2023)
Perumal Murugan’s new novel draws from his experiences to present a moving tale of displacement and a hunger for permanence. Muthu’s life is turned on its head when his father divides their family land and leaves him practically nothing. His family ties weakened after such a blow, Muthu leaves behind the life he has always known to seek out fresh new beginnings with his wife and his children.
Fire Bird traces Muthu’s efforts to establish himself after being cast aside and denounced by his family. His faith in his once-revered elder brother has been shaken, and nothing is as it should be. Murugan’s latest is an exploration of struggle and hope.
Perumal Murugan is a prolific writer in Tamil. His book Pyre has been longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. Ten out of his twelve novels have been translated into English. Janani Kannan is a US-based translator and architect.
6. Everything the Light Touches: A Novel by Janice Pariat
Genre: Historical fiction
Page count: 512
Publishing house: Harper Collins (13 October, 2022)
Everything the Light Touches follows the lives of four protagonists, spanning continents and centuries. In modern India, Shai, a young woman from Shillong, returns home from Delhi for the first time in years. Evelyn, a young woman in Edwardian England, leaves Cambridge for a quest through the Himalayas. Carl Linnaeus, botanist and zoologist, set forth on an expedition to Lapland in 1732. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe travels through Italy while formulating ideas for his book The Metamorphosis of Plants.
Separated by temporality and geography, the four travelers search for companionship and adventure. They find wonder and comfort in nature. Pariat’s inventive writing infuses her text with botanical facts and shifts from poetry to verse to prose.
Janice Pariat is the author of Boats on Land, Seahorse: A Novel, and the novella The Nine Chambered-Heart. Her works have been translated into ten languages. Her collection of short stories, Boats on Land, won a Sahitya Academy Award in 2013.
Also Read: Eco-Literature: 5 Books That Will Help You Get Started With Reading on the Environment
7. Mansur: A Novel by Vikramajit Ram
Genre: Historical fiction
Page count: 176
Publishing house: Pan Macmillan India (28 November, 2022)
Mansur opens in the early 17th century Mughal Empire. Ustad Mansur, a master miniature artist, works under the patronage of Emperor Jahangir. A specialist in watercolour studies displaying extraordinary and skilful realism, Mansur has been commissioned by Nur Jahan to illuminate the pages of a book of verse. She intends to present it to her husband, the emperor, as a keepsake. Ram’s novel magnificently recreates the once-celebrated but now-forgotten world of this court painter and his contemporaries, who slowly get enmeshed in a tangle of lies and secrets.
Vikramajit Ram is a Bangalore-based writer. He pursued graphic design as a profession for several years before becoming a writer. His works include Elephant Kingdom: Sculptures from Indian Architecture (2007) and two travelogues, Dreaming Vishnus: A Journey through Central India (2008) and Tso and La: A Journey in Ladakh (2012).
8. I Named My Sister Silence by Manoj Rupda (translated by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar)
Genre: Bildungsroman
Page count: 180
Publishing house: Eka (19 June, 2023)
I Named My Sister Silence is the coming-of-age tale of the narrator, an unnamed Adivasi boy who, at his sister’s insistence, leaves his village to get an education. He becomes an engineer and takes to the seas on a cargo ship. He is now a member of the educated intelligentsia, having come a long way from his small and hostile village. When he returns to find his sister, he finds instead that she has joined the Naxalites and that he has been involved in a complicated and malicious plot to rewrite and whitewash history.
Manoj Rupda writes in Hindi and is the author of several novels, collections of stories, and essays. He is a recipient of the Indu Sharma Katha Puraskar and the Vanmali Katha Samman. He is based in Nagpur, Maharashtra. Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar writes primarily in English but frequently translates works from Santhali, Bengali and Hindi into English. A doctor by profession, he has been shortlisted for several literary awards, including the Hindu Literary Prize, the Crossword Book Award, and the JCB Prize.
9. The Colony of Shadows by Bikram Sharma
Genre: Fantasy
Page count: 256
Publishing house: Hachette UK (20 September, 2022)
The recently orphaned Varun struggles to adjust to the demands of a new life with his aunt and grandmother in Bangalore. Grieving and lonely, finding greater comfort with a dog than the companionship of humans, he finds a mysterious hole in the walls of their garden and climbs through it. On the other side, Varun finds a ruined colony that looks exactly like the one where he lived with his parents in Delhi. He finds familiarity in the ruins that harbour secrets in its shadows. Will Varun break free of the colony, or will it and his grief swallow him? Bikram Sharma explores questions of loss, grief and more in this debut novel.
Bikram Sharma is a writer from Bangalore. In 2016, he was awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust writing fellowship at the University of Kent. The Colony of Shadows is his debut novel.
10. Manjhi’s Mayhem by Tanuj Solanki
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Page count: 216
Publishing house: Penguin Random House India Private Limited (21 November, 2022)
Sewaram Manjhi, a low-income migrant and security guard outside a posh Mumbai cafe, is just another one of the millions of invisible Indians. In this crowded city, he works by day and lifts bricks by night to build his muscles. Tanuj Solanki’s fast-paced noir thriller of murder, mystery and mayhem quickly takes a turn for the chaotic as Manjhi becomes involved with the bank mafia, money launderers and more.
The founder of the Bombay Literary Magazine, Tanuj Solanki is a writer of four highly acclaimed works of fiction. In 2019, he was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar for his short-story collection Diwali in Muzaffarnagar (2018). Solanki’s second novel, The Machine is Learning (2020), was longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature in the same year.
PS: The shortlist will be revealed on 20th October, and the winner will be announced in the month of November.
Also Read: 10 Must-Read Debut Novels of the Year 2023
