Winners at the Crossword Book Awards

In case you missed my tweets live from the Tata Theatre at the NCPA, here’s a quick summary.

In the fiction for children category, there was no award, the judges having decided that none quite made the grade. Personally, I found that disappointing, and it was a refrain I heard from many others too.

Catherine Thankamma & Narayan, (who shared the translation prize with Anita Agnihotri and Arunava Sinha - not in picture). non-fiction winner Aman Sethi and Popular winner Ravi Subramanian

In Indian Language in English Translation, there was a tie, with The Araya Woman, by Narayan, translated by Catherine Thankamma (OUP India) sharing the award with 17, by Anita Agnihotri, translated by Arunava Sinha (Zubaan).

The English Non-Fiction category saw A Free Man, by Aman Sethi (Random House India) beat out contenders like MJ Akbar, Arshia Sattar and Naresh Fernandes.

In Fiction in English, The Folded Earth, by Anuradha Roy (Simon & Schuster) came out on top of a strong field that included Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke, Booker nominated Narcopolis, by Jeet Thayil and The Sly Company Of People Who Care, by Rahul Bhattacharya.

And in the Popular category, where the ten-book short list included nominations for Chetan Bhagat, Rujuta Diwekar, Amitav Ghosh (his River of Smoke was the only book from the other categories to appear in the ‘popular’ list), Rashmi Bansal, Anita Bhogle & Harsha Bhogle, and Amish Tripathi, the winner was The Incredible Banker, by Ravi Subramanian.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.