In which H.M.Naqvi takes home $50,000 and Junot Diaz is the "winner in the ‘audience darling’ sweepstakes"

Supriya Nair is reporting from the Jaipur Literary Festival, and she's just posted to say that H.M.Naqvi's Homeboy has won the inaugural DSC South Asian Literary Prize.

The inaugural DSC South Asian Literature Prize, announced this evening at the Jaipur Literature Festival, was awarded to Pakistani-American author HM Naqvi for his 2010 novel, Homeboy.

DSC Prize jury chairperson Nilanjana Roy, who presented the award to Naqvi, said that the novel deserved commendation for “the raw energy of its prose and its evocation of a generation who can’t go home again.”

[...]
The prize, an award of $50,000, will be awarded annually by a jury to the best work of fiction pertaining to the South Asian region. The lack of a criterion for national eligibility differentiates the DSC Prize significantly from other major literary awards, such as the UK’s Man-Booker Prize, which is awarded only to writers from the Commonwealth, or the USA-specific National Book Awards.

Roy remarked that the literary establishment had only recently begun to debate and define Asian fiction, in a global conversation long dominated by the northern hemisphere. “Latin America has the Cervantes Prize, and Africa in recent years has the Caine Prize,” she said. “With the DSC Prize we’ve helped to fill something of a blank space in the literary world.”

Also, apparently Junot Diaz has stolen the show. If you're following tweets, there's precious little about yesterday's other lit star, Pamuk. Everyone was going on and on about Diaz, who'se still got the tweets buzzing.

Here's Supriya Nair again, about today's session that had a number of other people on the panel, but hey - it's all Diaz in the write-up!

Earlier, I was at a panel called ‘Imaginary Homelands,’ where Chandrahas Choudhury engaged a whole raft of writers – Marina Lewycka, Manjushree Thapa, Ian Jack, Junot Diaz and Kamila Shamsie – in a conversation about displacement, immigration, and its effects on literature. There’s often an inverse correlation between a panel’s quality and the number of speakers populating it, but this one was beautifully managed and presented. It occasioned the best thing I’ve heard anyone say over the last two days. “I don’t want to be part of a deracinated class of ‘universal’ writers who don’t really exist,” said Junot Diaz, in response to Choudhury’s question about being identified as a writer of place – in this case, a ‘Dominican writer’ – instead of the broader, more catholic identity of ‘writer.’ “Because let’s face it, no matter what language you’re writing in, the majority of the people on this planet can’t read it. I can be a Dominican writer if I can also be five billion other things at the same time. Otherwise, I’m not down with that shit.”

I’m down with Mr Diaz, as are several other people in the crowd, judging from whose reaction we have a clear winner in the ‘audience darling’ sweepstakes. Three more days to go: we’ll try and keep a running count of other crowd-pleasing moments here, at least from the panels that I’ll attend, which will be far fewer than I would like. I know, what a hard life. Off to catch Kiran Desai again, this time with Orhan Pamuk, Leila Aboulela, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Mohsin Hamid, talking with Rana Dasgupta. They may just be the only people with seats in the whole house.

 And did I say that Tehelka's live-streaming some sessions? Here.

Arundhati Roy and Kafila

I was going to say more, but I think I need to re-read everything first. At any rate, it's good to see all this ferment.

What am I talking about?

Arundhati Roy's essay, 'Walking with the Comrades' in Outlook.

The responses at Kafila came quickly. First with Jairus Banaji, followed by the one that everyone is circulating all over the interwebs, Moonwalking with the Comrades. Finally, there's A Believer's Obeisance and a possibly related post, Rumours of Maoism.

[And earlier, on Tehelka.]

Update: K. Balagopal's article from early last year (what a loss his death is), 'Reflections on violence and non-violence in political movements in India'. *


Also, Falstaff's substantial exposition of his problems with Roy's essay.

*Thanks, Paromita.

Tehelka's Fiction Special: Injury

Last year was Excess. This year, Injury. Something to look forward to in the last few days of the year, no?

Go read.

"Five years. People don't remember a thing..."

"Five years. People don't remember a thing here that happened five years back unless they're reminded of it."

Guess who said that.

No, not Tarun Tejpal, no editor of any newspaper, no one who yelled their heads off on The Big Fight. (Harsh Mandar may have tried to say something very like it, but if he did no one could hear him).

Billy Windsor. Who's Billy Windsor, you will ask. I will tell you.

Billy Windsor is temporary editor of the nauseating Cosy Moments, waiting for the big break in P.G.Wodehouse's Psmith Journalist. Wodehouse wrote the book in 1915. In it, Psmith helps Billy Windsor do a big story on cheap tenements and the big guys who make big money off the misery of the inhabitants. Nothing new there: politicians, gangs, cops that come after the gangs have all killed each other.

They find out that the owner of the ironically named Pleasant Street tenement is a guy who is running for City Alderman, and used to be Commissioner of Buildings. When a building he'd allowed collapsed, five years earlier, he lay low; now all that's blown over and he can come back and be Alderman, provided no one gums up the works for him. Billy and Psmith are trying to do precisely that. It is in this context that Windsor says, "People don't remember a thing here that happened five years back unless they're reminded of it."

Not unnaturally, I was reminded of the contents of the latest issue of Tehelka while reading all of this. Sure, tenement buildings do not compare with genocide, but remember that the book was written in 1915, before the term 'World War' was coined; before trench warfare and weapons of mass destruction became commonplace; before every dictator was also a butcher on a grand scale.

Then, as now, there was the default cynical view that one only needs a little time before everything - even the most horrifying crimes - can be forgotten; that a little relentless spin will transform a very culpable, unrepentant monster into a messiah for development; that the state machinery will side with said monster, never mind what they know to be the truth.

Bah.