Speaking Tiger Books title When the Moon Shines by Day by Nayantara Sahgal has been long listed for the JCB Prize for Literature 2018.
The JCB Prize for Literature is an award presented each year to a distinguished work of fiction by an Indian author, as selected by the jury.
Chaired by award-winning film director Deepa Mehta, the jury consisted of entrepreneur and scholar Rohan Murthy, Yale University astrophysicist and writer Priyamvada Natarajan, novelist Vivek Shanbhag, and author and translator Arshia Sattar. The shortlist will be announced on October 3 and the award presented on October 27.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nayantara Sahgal is the author of several works of fiction and non-fiction, the most recent of which, When the Moon Shines by Day, a novella, was published by Speaking Tiger in 2017.
Nayantara Sahgal been recently conferred the Lal Ded National Award 2018 by Sarhad, a social organization dedicated to building bridges amongst people in the border areas of India.
She earlier edited an anthology, Nehru’s India: Essays on the Maker of a Nation, published by Speaking Tiger in 2015. Her earlier works include Prison and Chocolate Cake, an autobiography published in 1954, and novels such as Rich Like Us, Plans for Departure and Lesser Breeds, which are regarded as contemporary classics. She has received the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Sinclair Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. She returned the Akademi Award in 2015 in protest against the murder by vigilantes of three writers, and the Akademi’s silence at the time. She has been a Vice President of the PUCL (People’s Union for Civil Liberties) and is engaged in an ongoing protest against the assaults on the freedom of expression and democratic rights.
One of the Jury member says about the award:
“A courageous, and dystopian, political novel, When the Moon Shines by Day describes the all-too-easy slip from the familiar and apparently harmless into the terrifying. This is a true novel of our time: India, 2018.”
