How much merit do literary prizes really hold for South Asian authors?

By Saurabh Sharma
26 September, 2023

How much merit do literary prizes really hold for South Asian authors?

By Saurabh Sharma
26 September, 2023

These honours not only provide mileage to writers but also help give a platform to lesser-known voices

Literary awards not only provide unprecedented visibility to authors and translators but also help recognise little-known voices. A major win changes fortune overnight. For example, ever since Tanzanian-British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah won the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, “several of his out-of-print novels are suddenly on the shelves again”. Post his Booker Prize win, the translation rights of author Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida were sold in 24 languages. Both in India and the United States, 70,000 copies were printed each. Karunatilaka’s publisher in the United Kingdom reprinted 70,000 hardcovers and 30,000 paperbacks, along with 30,000 copies for the Australian market.

Tilted Axis, the publisher of Daisy Rockwell’s International Booker Prize-winning English translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Ret Samadhi (Tomb of Sand), reprinted 15,000 copies right after the prize announcement. In India, Amazon witnessed both Hindi and English editions selling over “35,000 copies in one week alone”. This makes one wonder whether these recognitions should be treated as an anomaly or if there’s a genuine, newfound interest in literature from the global south. 

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