New Delhi: Hindi short story writer, novelist and poet Vinod Kumar Shukla has received the 2023 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. Shukla, 87 years old, is known for novels like Naukar Ki Kameez (1979) and poetry collections like Sab Kuch Hona Bacha Rahega (1992).
“Shukla’s prose and poetry are marked by acute, often defamiliarising, observation. The voice that emerges is that of a deeply intelligent onlooker; a daydreamer struck occasionally by wonder. Writing for decades without the recognition he deserves; Shukla has created literature that changes how we understand the modern,” the judges – Amit Chaudhuri, Roya Hakakian and Maaza Mengiste – said about his work.
Shukla has previously won the Sahitya Akademi award and the Atta Galatta–Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize.
“Shukla’s work is lauded for its distinctive linguistic texture and emotional depth. His singular literary style often breaks with convention, earning comparisons to magical realism that only partly capture his striking originality. Renowned for bringing the marvelous to the ordinary, in his intimate evocations of rural and small-town life and his interrogation of modern aspirations Shukla offers readers something universal,” PEN America’s announcement on the awards said.
Also read: ‘The Place of Love is Uncertain’: Two Poems by Vinod Kumar Shukla
The playwright Erika Dickerson-Despenza won the 2023 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award. It had previously been announced that Tina Fey will be receiving the 2023 PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award.
The award ceremony will be held on March 2 in New York.
“The recipients of our Literary Awards’ three career achievement honors reveal the breadth of what human imagination committed to the page, stage, and screen can offer us. With their inimitable and instantaneously recognizable styles—Shukla’s pairing of keen directness and wonder, Dickerson-Despenza’s collision of lyricism and urgency, Fey’s comedic sensitivity in an absurd world—they bring us into their distinct visions of reality, in all its slipperiness. They give us so much to celebrate,” said Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, Chief Program Officer, Literary Programming at PEN America.