New prize turns spotlight on south Asian literature

Amit Chaudhuri's novel The Immortals is among the six titles shortlisted for a new literary prize, the DSC prize for south Asian literature . Worth $50,000 (£31,500), and sponsored by an Indian construction company, the international prize has been set up to raise awareness of south Asian culture around the world, and is unusual in being open to authors of any nationality so long as the work is based on the region and its people. Chaudhuri's lyrical tale of two music-loving Bombay families in the 1970s and 80s, which was also on the south Asia regional shortlist for this year's Commonwealth Writers' prize, joins a list dominated by stories of characters whose lives are caught between different continents. In Tania James's Atlas Of Unknowns, two sisters from Kerala are separated when one gets a scholarship to a prestigious New York school; in Manju Kapur's The Immigrant, a newly married couple struggles both with a new home in Canada and with wedded life itself; while in Neel Mukherjee's A Life Apart, a young gay man leaves a blighted childhood in Calcutta behind him for what he hopes will be a new world of possibilities in England. Two of the writers selected have yet to be published in the UK. HM Naqvi's Home Boy, the story of three young Pakistani men taking a road trip through America in the wake of 9/11, was submitted to the prize by HarperCollins India; while Musharraf Ali Farooqui's The Story of a Widow, the tale of a Karachi woman who finds herself unexpectedly wooed again in widowhood, came from Picador India. The chair of the judges, Indian journalist and critic Nilanjana S Roy, said the shortlist represented "some of the finest and most rewarding of the work produced by novelists about south Asia". Former publisher Lord Matthew Evans, one-time Granta editor Ian Jack, and writers Amitava Kumar and Moni Mohsin are also judging the prize. The winner will be announced in India, at the DSC Jaipur literature festival in January.