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The best book is…

Photo: S. Thanthoni

Gearing up for the show K. Vaitheeswaran

Indian authors, get your acceptance speeches ready. Indiaplaza.in, the largest online bookstore in India presents the Golden Quill Book Awards for Indian authors writing in English, and its inaugural award show is just around the corner.

And book lovers, time to catch up on your reading. Because these awards aren’t just about a jury of critics — regular readers have as much of a say.

“Most book awards are selected by a jury — and we are doing that — but we also wanted our readers to have the power of deciding the best book,” says K. Vaitheeswaran, co-founder and chief operating officer of Indiaplaza.in. “That’s why we have instituted two separate awards — the Critics’ Choice Awards and the Readers’ Choice Award — for the same shortlist.”

Bookworms who want to vote for the Readers’ Choice Awards just have to log onto www.indiaplaza.in and make their choice (and maybe win some nifty gift certificates in the process). Meanwhile, the jury for the critics’ award boasts of some pretty big names, including writer and former BBC journalist Sir Mark Tully, journalist and theatre critic Shanta Gokhale, writer and columnist Anita Nair, and novelist Mahasweta Devi.

“I’m personally curious to see if the jury’s choice and the reader’s choice are the same — will the jury’s choice reflect the readers’?” says Vaitheeswaran.

The other unusual aspect is that only authors of Indian citizenship who’re also domiciled in India are eligible for these awards. A cash prize of one lakh will be awarded to the winners.

“The number of people writing in India is going up rapidly — several hundred, even over a thousand books get published every year, but we don’t hear of most of them,” says Vaitheeswaran. “The truth is that writers in India simply don’t get the kind of exposure those living abroad do and we want to focus on promoting them.”

The sheer volume of books being published every year does mean that Indiaplaza.in will have no trouble making the awards an annual affair.

“In fact, we’d like to increase our number of categories to include translations, children’s books, non-fiction as well as books in Indian languages in upcoming years,” says Vaitheeswaran.

For this year’s shortlist, major publishers in the country were asked to submit a list of what they considered the best books by Indian authors published in the calendar year of 2007, which was then pruned down by professional reviewers.

Voting on the shortlist remains open online until August 20 and the award show will be held in the last week of the month in Bangalore. If you haven’t read those books yet, now would be a good time to get cracking!

THE SHORTLIST

A Girl And A River - Usha K R

Above Average - Amitabha Bagchi

The Sugar Baron’s Daughter - Loveleen Kacker

If God Was A Banker - Ravi Subramanian

Naked In The Wind - Brinda Charry

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