India: The Shri Ramswaroop Memorial Prize for the Best Political Novel

The Shri Ramswaroop Memorial University (SRMU), Lucknow has announced a Prize for the Best Political Novel, first of its kind award in literature. This year (2017), the prize will be a cash award of INR 50,000 and an honour conferred by the SRMU.

The announcement for short-listed titles/authors will be made on 17-18 February 2017 in Lucknow. All writers whose novels have been published in India are eligible. It is a fully jury based prize: it involves direct nominations from peers and not entries by publishing houses. The winner will be announced at Lucknow in the second half of 2017.

“As we cannot possibly undertake a prize that covers all Anglophone novels in the world or the many excellent political novels published in India’s other languages, this prize is restricted to novels originally written in English and published in India in a given calendar year,” the press note said. The literature prize is the first-ever to be awarded by a University in India.

The rules and procedures of the prize for this year are;

• Novels originally written in English and published in India in the given calendar year will be eligible. This means 1st January 2016 to 31st January 2016 for the prize to be awarded in 2017.
• The authors of the novels might or might not be Indian, but the topics of their novels must be adjudged to be of significant political interest to Indian readers by a select and anonymous committee of qualified readers.
• This will be done by appointing a significant writer or scholar as the jury head for that particular year. The jury head will then invite nine other significant writers, scholars and literary editors to recommend a title each from the year under consideration. The jury head will change every year.