The 8th edition of the IME Nepal Literature Festival, held from December 13-16 at Pokhara, concluded with the announcement of the winner of DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019.
The $25,000 award went to Amitabha Bagchi for his 2018 novel, Half the Night is Gone. It was presented by Pradeep Gawali, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nepal, in the presence of Surina Narula, founder of the DSC Prize, and the four-member jury, headed by Harish Trivedi, former Professor of English at University of Delhi.
The six shortlisted books included one translated work (Manoranjan Byapari’s There’s Gunpowder in the Air, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha), a novel by Pakistan-born author Jamil Jan Kochai and another by Sadia Abbas, who grew up in Pakistan and Singapore, besides fiction by Indian authors.
The DSC Prize, instituted in 2010, awards fiction from the South Asian region, which includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, as well as from the diaspora.
Ninety books had been submitted for the prize this year.
