BOOKS
‘This Divided Island’ longlisted for Samuel Johnson prize
An account of Sri Lanka's civil war by Indian author Samanth
Subramanian has been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize 2015,
making him the second Indian to be nominated for the prestigious award.
 Founded
in 1999, Samuel Johnson prize is one of United Kingdom's most
prestigious awards for non-fiction.
Samanth's book ‘This Divided Island’ is among the 12 books longlisted
for the prize (prize money: 20,000 pound), whose shortlist will be
announced in October during the London Literature Festival. The winner
will be named in November.
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Samanth Subramanian
Photo by Purushottam
Diwakar India Today Group
Getty Images |
Before Samanth, Suketu Mehta was the only Indian who had been
shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Mehta was shortlisted for his
book 'Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found' in 2005.
"The book tracks the rise of militant Buddhism, driven by monk
politicians who hold extraordinary, extreme opinions," publishers
Penguin Random House said in a statement today.
Driven by curiosity about the scars and legacies of a long war,
Samanth moved to Sri Lanka in 2011 and over the next year, he travelled
across the island, and through Sri Lankan communities living overseas,
talking to hundreds of people about how their lives were twisted out of
shape by the war.
The prize is open to authors of all non-fiction books in current
affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography
autobiography and the arts.
Samanth, a Delhi-based journalist, won the 2010 Shakti Bhatt First
Book Prize for his first book of narrative non-fiction ‘Following Fish:
Travels around the Indian Coast’, which was also shortlisted for the
2013 Andre Simon Prize.
This year's judging panel, chaired by the Pulitzer prize-winning
historian Anne Applebaum, also longlisted the books ‘Guantanamo Diary’
by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, ‘Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan
Bate’, ‘Black Earth’ by Tim Snyder, ‘Fighters in the Shadows by Robert
Gildea’, ‘The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq’
by Emma Sky.
‘Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern
Russia’by Peter Pomerantsev, ‘The Four Dimensional Human’, by Laurence
Scott, ‘Landmarks’by Robert McFarlane, ‘The Planet Remade’ by Oliver
Morton, ‘Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism’ by Steve Silberman and ‘The
Four-Dimensional Human’ by Laurence Scott complete the shortlist.
- Huffington Post |
