Seven of the selected works have been penned by women writers.
The longlist for the 2019 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature was announced on Thursday, with women dominating the list. Out of the 15 longlisted works, seven have been penned by women writers.
Among those making the cut are Akil Kumarasamy for Half Gods, Devi S Laskar for The Atlas of Reds and Blues, Fatima Bhutto for The Runaways, Madhuri Vijay for The Far Field, Sadia Abbas for The Empty Room, Tova Reich for Mother India and Shubhangi Swaroop for Latitudes of Longing.
Instituted in 2010, the award encourages and rewards fiction writing about the South Asian region comprising Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. It carries a cash prize of USD 25,000.
The list also includes three translations—Perumal Murugan’s A Lonely Harvest (translated from Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan), Manoranjan Byapari’s There’s Gunpowder in the Air (translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha) and T.D. Ramakrishnan’s Sugandhi alias Andal Devanayaki(translated from Malayalam by Priya K Nair). Other entries include Jamil Jan Kochai for 99 Nights in Logar, Mirza Waheed for Tell Her Everything and Nadeem Zaman for In the Time of the Others, Amitabha Bagchi for Half the Night is Gone and Rajkamal Jha for The City and the Sea.
The longlist was selected out of 90 eligible entries of which 47 per cent were by women. They were judged by a five-member international jury chaired by Harish Trivedi, professor of English at the University of Delhi.
The shortlist will be announced on November 6.
