Tata Literature Live! Literary Awards Longlist for 2021 Announced
Delhi: Each year, the Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest confers literary awards for Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Business books published during the year, to recognise and encourage literary talent across the genres, for both established and new writers. The Awards are regarded as prestigious and are one of the main highlights of the Festival.
The winners will, as per tradition, be announced at the closing session of the Festival. Since the Festival is online again this year due to the continuing Covid-19 pandemic, the awards ceremony will be the final virtual session on Sunday, 21 November.
The Longlists in each category (in alphabetical order), and the eminent juries that decided the awards are as follows:
Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year (Fiction) Longlist (in alphabetical order)
1. Asoca: A Sutra by Irwin Allan Sealy (Penguin Random House)
2. China Room by Sunjeev Sahota (Penguin Random House)
3. Essential Items and Other Tales from a Land in Lockdown by Udayan Mukherjee (Bloomsbury)
4. Murder at the Mushaira by Raza Mir (Aleph)
5. Names of the Women by Jeet Thayil (Penguin Random House)
6. The Last Queen by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (HarperCollins)
Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year (Non-Fiction) Longlist (in alphabetical order)
1. Born a Muslim: Some Truths About Islam in India by Ghazala Wahab (Aleph)
2. Lady Doctors: The Untold Stories of India’s First Women in Medicine by Kavitha Rao (Westland)
3. Space. Life. Matter.: The Coming of Age of Indian Science by Hari Pulakkat (Hachette)
4. The Braided River: A Journey Along the Brahmaputra by Samrat Choudhury (HarperCollins)
5. The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move by Sonia Shah (Bloomsbury)
6. Undercover: My Journey into the Darkness of Hindutva by Ashish Khetan (Westland)
Tata Literature Live! First Book (Fiction) Longlist (in alphabetical order)
1. A Bit of Everything by Sandeep Raina (Westland)
2. A Death in Shonagachhi by Rijula Das (Pan MacMillan)
3. Gods and Ends by Lindsay Pereira (Penguin Random House)
4. Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian (HarperCollins)
5. The City of Good Death by Priyanka Champaneri (Penguin Random House)
6. The Eminently Forgettable Life of Mrs. Pankajam by Meera Rajagopalan (Hachette)
Tata Literature Live! First Book (Non-Fiction) Longlist (in alphabetical order)
1. After I was Raped: The Untold Lives of Five Rape Survivors by Urmi Bhattacheryya (Pan MacMillan)
2. Billions Under Lockdown: The Inside Story of India’s Fight Against COVID-19 by Abantika Ghosh (Bloomsbury)
3. Breathing Here is Injurious to Your Health: The Human Cost of Air Pollution and How You Can Be the Change by Jyoti Pande Lavakare (Hachette)
4. It’s All In Your Head, M by Manjiri Indurkar (Westland)
5. Landscapes of Loss: The Story of an Indian Drought by Kavitha Iyer (HarperCollins)
6. Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir by Farah Bashir (HarperCollins)
Tata Literature Live! Business Book of the Year Longlist (in alphabetical order)
1. Fossil Free: Reimagining Clean Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World by Sumant Sinha (HarperCollins)
2. Pandemonium: The Great Indian Banking Tragedy by Tamal Bandyopadhyay (Roli Books)
3. Spring: Bouncing Back From Rejection by Ambi Parameswaran (Westland)
4. The Economics of Small Things by Sudipta Sarangi (Penguin Random House)
5. The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning by Gautam Baid (HarperCollins)
6. The Ventilator Project by Srikant Sastri & Amitabha Bandyopadhyay (Pan MacMillan)
Juries for the awards
Each award category is decided by an eminent jury. The juries for 2021 were as follows:
Fiction
Ø Arundhati Subramaniam: Poet, author, journalist and curator.
Ø Githa Hariharan: Author, editor and columnist.
Ø Shashi Warrier: Author, columnist and professor.
Ø Vinita Mathew: Professor of English Literature, Wilson College, Mumbai
Ø Shireen Mistry: Committee Member, Tata Literature Live!; communications professional
Non-Fiction
Ø Amrita Shah: Author and journalist
Ø Dilip D’Souza: Author and journalist
Ø Nivedita Menon: Author, scholar, professor of Political Thought at JNU
Ø Sanjay Johri: Independent director and former Managing Director of Voltas and Reader’s Digest
Ø Tina Nagpaul: Committee Member, Tata Literature Live!; writer and filmmaker
Business
Ø Arun Kumar: Chairman and CEO, KPMG India
Ø Emmanuel David: Strategic Leader, Influencer and Coach; Former Chief Human Resources Officer, Voltas
Ø Errol D’Souza: Professor of Economics and Director, IIM Ahmedabad
Ø Shaili Chopra: Business journalist, author, entrepreneur and founder of SheThePeople TV
Ø Shinjini Kumar: Corporate leader, entrepreneur and co-founder of SALT, a financial services app focused on women
For more details about Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest 2021, please visit:
Website: https://tatalitlive.
Speakers: https://tatalitlive.
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The Tata Group is the title sponsor of Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest, and the festival will also be supported by a few other Tata companies. The festival was conceived by Anil Dharker (1947-2021) who was also the founder and festival director of Literature Live! which organises the festival with the support of the Tata Group.