Jhumpa Lahiri has won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2015 for The Lowland, published in the UK by Bloomsbury.Lahiri was named the winner of the $50,000 prize at the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival taking place in India this week.
The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature is open to any author belonging to any part of the globe as long as the work is based on the South Asian region and its people.
Chair of the prize’s jury, writer Keki N Daruwalla, said: “The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri is a superb novel written in restrained prose with moments of true lyricism. It starts with a sense of loss and trauma due to the death and then the ongoing presence of a key character. The novel is partly political and partly familial, starting with an unromanticised account of the Indian Naxalite movement and ending with a series of individual emotional resolutions.
He added: "The Lowland is a novel about the difficulty of love in complex personal and societal circumstances, inhabited by characters which are finely drawn and where the lowland itself is a metaphor running through their entire lives. This is a fine novel written by a writer at the height of her powers.”
Lahiri, who was not able to collect the prize in person, beat shortlisted authors Bilal Tanweer for The Scatter Here is Too Great (Jonathan Cape); Kamila Shamsie for A God in Every Stone (Bloomsbury); Romesh Gunesekera for Noontide Toll (Granta); and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi for The Mirror of Beauty (Penguin).
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