Love India, desire to live there: DSC Prize winner Anuk Arudpragasam

Zafri Mudasser Nofil

(Dhaka, Nov 26, 2017) Sri Lankan writer Anuk Arudpragasam, the winner of this year’s DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, loves India and has a desire to live in the country once he is back from the US after completing his PhD.

Just 29 years of age, Arudpragasam bagged the USD 25,000 prize for his debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage, which is set during the civil war in Sri Lanka. The award was presented to him at the Dhaka Lit Fest on November 18.

He is now going back to New York to complete his doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University.

“After that I would move back to South Asia, either India or Sri Lanka. I desire to live in India as I like India a lot,” Arudpragasam tells PTI in an interview after his win here.

The fact that he has won a major literature prize for his first book is yet to sink in.

“It’s like a bit too early to appreciate but obviously I am very happy. This is the first prize I won, the first real big recognition I got. I think I will feel the positive effects in the coming weeks and months, over a longer period of time. But this prize is a kind of security. You feel you can continue to write,” he says.

For the past two years, Arudpragasam has been working on another novel.

“It is a structurally complicated novel, so it has taken more time to write. It is about yearning, about a feeling of incompleteness,” he says.

There was more good news for the young writer. He was also named the winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize 2017. The prize carries a cash award of Rs 2 lakh and a trophy.

The Story of a Brief Marriage is published by Granta Books and in India by HarperCollins.

It is focused on one individual and how the war affected this family, says Arudpragasam.

Two and a half decades into the devastating civil war, Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority is pushed inexorably towards the coast by the advancing Army.

Among the evacuees is Dinesh, whose world has contracted to a makeshift camp where time is measured by the shells that fall around him like clockwork.

Alienated from family, home, language, and body, he exists in a state of mute acceptance, numb to the violence around him, till he is approached one morning by an old man who makes an unexpected proposal: that Dinesh marry his daughter, Ganga. Marriage, in this world, is an attempt at safety, like the beached fishing boat under which Dinesh huddles during the bombings.

As a couple, they would be less likely to be conscripted to fight for the rebels, and less likely to be abused in the case of an Army victory.

Thrust into this situation of strange intimacy and dependence, Dinesh and Ganga try to come to terms with everything that has happened, hesitantly attempting to awaken to themselves and to one another before the war closes over them once more.

“My book is focused on this one individual (Dinesh) who has become alienated from himself, not just from the body but also from his own memories. He lost his memory. He has forgotten about the basic things – what to talk about, what to say to each other. He has forgotten completely about ordinary life,” says the author.

The characters in the novel are fictional but Arudpragasam says they are based on real people who had such experiences – people he talked to, people he read about and people he saw.

“Each character is a composite of different real people,” he says.

Arudpragasam started writing The Story of a Brief Marriage in 2010.

“The process was very spontaneous. No reporters or external observers were allowed in the war zone and very few people had an idea of what was happening. Months after the war, through the survivors, some footage – videos and pictures – started making way to the Internet. This is when I came across a lot of this material,” he says.

Arudpragasam describes The Story of a Brief Marriage as a “very psychological and very introspective” book.

“It deals with trauma and what is means to be traumatised,” he says.

After DSC Prize, Arudpragasam bags Shakti Bhatt award

(New Delhi, Nov 22, 2017) Sri Lankan author Anuk Arudpragasam, who won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature on Saturday, has now bagged the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize 2017 for his debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage, set in the backdrop of the civil war.

The jury of Kamila Shamsie, Rohini Mohan and Margaret Mascarenhas chose Arudpragasam’s book over Prayaag Akbar’s Leila, Hirsh Sawhney’s South Haven, How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy, Tripti Lahiri’s Maid In India and These Circuses that Sweep Through the Landscape by Tejaswini Apte-Rahm.

Now in its tenth year, the prize was set up in 2008 in memory of young writer Shakti Bhatt to encourage authors from the sub-continent. The prize is a cash award of Rs 2 lakh and a trophy.

The award ceremony will take place on December 20.

The Story of a Brief Marriage presents the civil war in Sri Lanka like never before. Writing from within the debris of Tamil lives, Arudpragasam’s protagonists find dignity as they piece together strategies of survival.

The story is about the human spirit in the most desperate of times. It sings not as testament of glory but as a dirge of despair, according to the jury.

The novel, published in India by HarperCollins, won the USD 25,000 DSC Prize at the just-concluded Dhaka Lit Fest.

Sharing his sentiments on the win, Udayan Mitra, Publisher (Literary) at HarperCollins India said, “Anuk Arudpragasam’s novel ‘A Story of a Brief Marriage’ is a work of extraordinary sensitivity and imagination: a short novel that unfolds over a small time span during the final battle between the Sri Lankan army and the LTTE in 2009, it has a ripple effect that resounds and ricochets in the reader’s consciousness, for it is an unforgettable work about life and the human condition.”

Two and a half decades into the devastating civil war, Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority is pushed inexorably towards the coast by the advancing army. Among the evacuees is Dinesh, whose world has contracted to a makeshift camp where time is measured by the shells that fall around him like clockwork.

Alienated from family, home, language, and body, he exists in a state of mute acceptance, numb to the violence around him, till he is approached one morning by an old man who makes an unexpected proposal: that Dinesh marry his daughter, Ganga. Marriage, in this world, is an attempt at safety, like the beached fishing boat under which Dinesh huddles during the bombings.

As a couple, they would be less likely to be conscripted to fight for the rebels, and less likely to be abused in the case of an army victory. Thrust into this situation of strange intimacy and dependence, Dinesh and Ganga try to come to terms with everything that has happened, hesitantly attempting to awaken to themselves and to one another before the war closes over them once more.

Lankan author Anuk Arudpragasam wins DSC Prize for 2017

Zafri Mudasser Nofil

(Dhaka, Nov 18, 2017) Sri Lankan author Anuk Arudpragasam is the winner of this year’s DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his book The Story of a Brief Marriage, beating the likes of Aravind Adiga, Karan Mahajan and Anjali Joseph.

The jury said the novel is told in meditative, nuanced and powerful prose and marks the arrival of an extraordinary new literary voice.

The USD 25,000 DSC Prize was awarded to the winner along with a trophy by Bangladesh Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith on the concluding day of the Dhaka Literary Festival (DLF).

Ritu Menon, chair of the jury, said, “The jury met and discussed the shortlisted novels in detail. As all the shortlisted novels had considerable strengths and remarkable literary quality, deciding the winner was not an easy task.”

She said the jury agreed that Arudpragasam was the best possible choice for his outstanding novel which is “impressive for its intensity and rich detail, and for exploring the tragic heart of war with such quiet eloquence.”

“It is also a testament to the redemptive power of love, and to the human spirit’s capacity for hope,” she added.

The Story of a Brief Marriage is published by Granta Books.

The other shortlisted authors were Anjali Joseph for The Living, Aravind Adiga for Selection Day, Karan Mahajan for The Association of Small Bombs and Stephen Alter for In the Jungles of the Night.

Interesting trends in South Asian writing: DSC Prize jury

(New Delhi, Nov 14, 2017) With the DSC literature prize winner all set to be announced at Dhaka this Saturday, the judges say they found interesting trends emerging in South Asian writing – uprootedness, geographical, spiritual alienation as also the allure of joining extremist organisations overseas.

The five shortlisted novels are Anjali Joseph’s The Living, The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam, Aravind Adiga’s Selection Day, Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs and In the Jungles of the Night by Stephen Alter.

According to jury chair Ritu Menon, all the five novels display a remarkable skill in animating current universal preoccupations in unconventional idioms, and from a distinctively South Asian perspective.

Jury member Valentine Cunningham says his long view of fiction by South Asian writers has been affirmed by this year’s contestants: “there’s a great deal of middling material, fictions that are not much good, to put it bluntly, often rather narrowly focussed (the same domestic, marital, family, political, historical  aspects and concerns cropping up again and again).”

The best fictionists are the best because they manage to work these familiar furrows with such canniness, aplomb, and (various) imaginative and formal force as to make them rise out of the ordinary, he adds.

“Such rising is the characteristic of our shortlist.”

Cunningham also argues that it’s also the arresting case that not all but very many, even a majority, of the best contemporary South Asian fictionists live and write abroad – in Canada, the US and England, especially in Canada and the US.

“This has a lot to do with Canadian and US and some British universities providing a home for South Asian writers – beginning, in the case of the US and Canada, at the student level.  Which is, of course, why the most notable of modern South Asian fiction is often about uprootedness, geographical and spiritual alienation, being liminal between cultures,” he told PTI.

Another judge Senath Walter Perera says politics in the South Asian region continues to be a popular theme – often treated seriously but sometimes in a manner that is burlesque.

“This year the allure of joining extremist organisations overseas for those living comfortable, middle class lives in the West was an additional concern,” he says.

“Issues relating to diasporic living persist in South Asian writing emerging from the UK and the US though the focus is now on the children or grandchildren of immigrants,” he adds.

Although no translation made it to the shortlist, Perera says the jury read many excellent translations which provided another dimension to the competition.

“Raj nostalgia remains an irresistible theme in South Asian writing in English with carefully researched narratives on the period. I did not find much innovation in narrative structure in this year’s entries though an epistolary novel between women living in two different South Asian countries did catch my eye,” he says, adding this was his personal response.