New Delhi: Two Indian authors – Meena Kandasamy and Madhuri Vijay – have been longlisted for the annual Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize.
Poet, fiction writer, translator and activist Kandasamy has been longlisted for her novel Exquisite Cadavers, and Pushcart Prize recipient Vijay for her debut novel The Far Field.
A total of 12 authors are on the longlist for the £30,000 prize.
The annual Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize was launched in 2016 and celebrates English-language writers below the age of 40. All forms of fiction – poetry, novels, short stories and drama – come under its purview. The prize is named after the Swansea-born writer, Dylan Thomas. “One of the most influential, internationally-renowned writers of the mid-twentieth century, the prize invokes his memory to support the writers of today and nurture the talents of tomorrow,” the prize committee said in a statement.
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Exquisite Cadavers is a novel about a young couple navigating love in London. The prize committee describes it as “a literary hall of mirrors about an author navigating the inspirations behind her work”. In addition to the story of the young couple, the author’s own notes are in the margins – what she was thinking about when she wrote a section, how an idea came to her, and so on.
“As the story progresses, we see that the life and experiences and inspirations of the author begin to either find parallels, or inverse representations in the story of the characters as well. Sometimes, the margins remain silent (as during the portrayal of the fathers) – and allow the characters to forge a world all of their own,” Kandasamy told Scroll.in in an interview.
Kandasamy has challenged the traditional format of novel-writing in Exquisite Cadavers. “This spiky, argumentative book is the novel as protest, as polemic, as dark comedy, as game,” a reviewer for The Guardian wrote.
Vijay’s The Far Field, according to the prize committee, “is an elegant, epic novel that follows one young woman’s search for a lost figure from her childhood, a journey that takes her from Southern India to Kashmir and to the brink of a devastating political and personal reckoning.”
The book won the 2019 JCB Prize for Literature. “The Far Field is an impressively ambitious novel of stunning emotional and psychological acuity. This deeply introspective story, located in troubled Kashmir, is also a panoramic exploration of our ideas and assumptions about nationhood. Rendered in visually evocative, lucid prose, and driven by a fragile but compelling narrator-protagonist, this tragic novel teems with unforgettable characters. We are proud to celebrate the arrival of a luminous new talent in Indian literature,” the jury for that award said.
Other longlisted books include Surge by Jay Bernard, Flèche by Mary Jean Chan, Things we say in the Dark by Kirsty Logan, Black Car Burning by Helen Mort, Virtuoso by Yelena Moskovich, Inland by Téa Obreht, Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler, If All the World and Love were Young by Stephen Sexton, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong and Lot by Bryan Washington.
The shortlist will be announced on April 7 and the winner on May 14.