The recent spurt in the field of children's literature in India has been duly noted by draftsmen of the Vodafone Crossword Book Awards 2009, who have, this year, installed a new prize category for it - 11 years after the awards were instituted. No surprise then that the chief guest for the evening was the legendary Ruskin Bond. Since Bond makes infrequent excursions out of Mussoorie, this rare opportunity to hear him speak quieted the congregation at NCPAs Tata Theatre when he took the stage. "Writers should be read and not heard or even seen, because only a few of them are good looking,'' joked Bond, adding that when he started writing 50 years ago, there were no literary fairs or awards. "In fact, I worked in a literary vacuum.''
The preliminaries eventually closed in on the raison d'etre of the evening - the awards. The prize for Fiction was brought home by Mumbai's own Kalpana Swaminathan for her Venus Crossing: Twelve Stories of Crossing (Penguin Books India). Rajni Bakshi and Sunanda K Datta-Ray were joint recipients of the Non-Fiction Prize. It was Bakshi's Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom (Penguin Books India), and Datta-Ray's Looking East to Look West (Penguin Viking) that made it through the wringers. On the shelf for Children's literature was The Grasshopper's Run (Scholastic India) by Siddhartha Sarma - the frontrunner for this award. Othappu: The Scent of the Other Side (Oxford) won author Sarah Joseph and translator Valson Thampu the Translation trophy. And finally, reader votes for the Popular Prize were in favour of Rajni Bakshi once again.
Full report here Times of India
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