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The chosen four
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Four Chennai novelists are shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2007. DIVYA KUMAR has the story.
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Four Chennai writers have been on tenterhooks since mid-June. They were told that their unpublished novels had made the longlist for the first annual Man Asian Literary Prize 2007. And then they were told that they couldn’t tell the world about
it until it was announced officially in July.
“It was awful!” says Tulsi Badrinath, laughing. “It’s one thing to hide deep, dark secrets, but keeping such happy news to yourself is incredibly hard.”
They were put out of their misery on July 20 when the longlist of 23 authors from all over Asia was released for the world to see. And it was good news all the way for India — of the 23, half were Indian, with more entries being chosen from Chennai than any other city.
For Nalini Rajan, a PhD in Social Communication and an associate professor at the Asian College of Journalism, seeing her first novel The Pangolin’s Tale on the longlist was a “pleasant shock.” “When I starte
d this book in the mid-1990s, it was for personal reasons, and I didn’t even show it to anybody for years,” she says. “I never expected it to take this trajectory.”
Anuradha Vijayakrishnan, an MBA who works at Citibank, compares it to hearing her baby’s heartbeat for the first time. “Seeing my manuscript being referred to as a novel for the first time makes me feel it really exists.”
Like Nalini, Tulsi, an ex-banker and a classical dancer trained by Shanta Dhananjayan, and Anuradha are also first-time novelists. Tulsi used to hide behind her files at her “boring bank job” and write in secret, before she gave it up to teach dance at the Bharata Kalanjali and work on her book The Living God full time. And Anuradha wrote See the Girl after midnight everyday after she came back from work and put her three-year-old daughter to sleep. <
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Their books may have never seen the light of day if they hadn’t heard of the prize for unpublished works in English by Asian writers. “The fact that they were looking for unpublished manuscripts was very encouraging for someone who hasn’t been published before,” says Tulsi.
Shreekumar Varma, on the other hand, isn’t exactly new to the business. The poet, playwright and novelist has many publications to his credit including his debut novel Lament of Mohini (2000) and two children’s books. S
till, Shreekumar’s entry, Maria’s Room, had been lying around since 2001 without being published because his long-awaited book on Chennai was first in the publishing pipeline at Penguin.
Like the others, he’s just glad for the exposure that making the longlist will bring his novel regardless of whether they make the shortlist in October or not. “What something like this does is bring more readers to you, and that’s what I’m most excited about,” says the writer, who is the great grandson of Raja Ravi Varma.
The 23 works were chosen out of 243 manuscripts submitted from across Asia — India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines and Cambodia — including translated works. The prize is jointly administered by the Hong Kong International Library Festival, the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is being sponsored by Man Group plc, the financial company based in London that also sponsors the Booker prize.
Now the four writers have another long wait — for the shortlist in October, and the announcement of the winner of the award in November 2007. Tulsi has just one wish for now: “I hope they won’t make us wait a month to tell people if we do make the shortlist!”
PHOTOS: K.V. SRINIVASAN
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