DSC Prize for Amitabha Bagchi's novel 'Half the Night is Gone'

The announcement of Amitabha Bagchi's brilliant novel "Half The Night Is Gone" having won the prestigious DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019 was made at a special award ceremony at the IME Nepal Literature Festival in the picturesque city of Pokhara. Pradeep Gyawali, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Nepal, along with Surina Narula, co-founder of the DSC Prize presented the winner's trophy to Amitabha Bagchi during the event. The DSC Prize has always encouraged diverse voices that bring alive the layered nuances of South Asian life, and Bagchi's novel, a post-colonial saga that unfolds over three generations, adroitly explores human relationships, and the intertwining of fates and cultures in a thoroughly Indian context. The novel's amazing attention to details, the inventive use of language, and its memorable well-defined characters make it an outstanding read.

The six shortlisted authors and novels in contention for the DSC Prize this year were Amitabha Bagchi: Half the Night is Gone (Juggernaut Books, India), Jamil Jan Kochai: 99 Nights in Logar (Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury, India & UK, and Viking, Penguin Random House, USA), Madhuri Vijay: The Far Field (Grove Press, Grove Atlantic, USA), Manoranjan Byapari: There's Gunpowder in the Air (Translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha, Eka, Amazon Westland, India), Raj Kamal Jha: The City and the Sea (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House, India), and Sadia Abbas: The Empty Room (Zubaan Publishers, India)