A host of celebrated writers, including acclaimed authors and historians Deborah Moggach, David Kynaston, Sarah Wise and Alex Werner, screenwriter Sarah Phelps (who wrote the recent BBC adaptation of Great Expectations) and one of our best known children’s authors Michael Rosen, discuss their love of Dickens’ writing, London in the 19th century and the power that Dickens continues to hold today.

The day will also include a ‘I Never Knew That About Dickens Quiz’, hosted by Christopher Winn, author of the popular ‘I Never Knew That About…’ series. The audience will have the opportunity to win a selection of the books discussed on the day, including sixteen of Dickens’ works.

Ticket holders will also receive a goody bag including a free Vintage Classics book.

1.45-2.00pm - I NEVER KNEW THAT ABOUT DICKENS 

Christopher Winn

Christopher Winn (author of the bestselling I Never Knew That About… series) will test our knowledge with an ‘I Never Knew That About Dickens Quiz’. Christopher has been researching little known facts and interesting trivia on the author and his books to stump even the most avid Dickens fan. The quiz will take part in two rounds and at the end of the day there will be prizes awarded to the Dickens Quiz Champions

Rohit Manchanda and Srikumar Sen were announced the joint winners of the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize 2012 for their unpublished manuscripts, respectively, A Place in Mind and The Skinning Tree.

See the video from the Prize Reception below.

Tibor Jones South Asia Prize

Rohit Manchanda and Srikumar Sen are today announced the joint winners of the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize 2012 for their unpublished manuscripts, respectively, A Place in Mind and The Skinning Tree.

South Asia Prize winners Rohit Manchanda and Sri Sen

Manchanda and Sen were named the winners at an award reception in a New Delhi residence hosted by UK-based Tibor Jones & Associates, the Charles Pick Consultancy and Foyles Bookstore. The tied winners will split the 1 Lakh Rupees cash prize and both receive literary representation by Tibor Jones & Associates.

This is the first year of the prize, set to become an annual feature on the South Asian literary landscape, which aims to nurture new unrecognized talent.

The prize was judged by an esteemed panel of literary and publishing professionals, chaired by author Amit Chaudhuri, alongside Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, the poet, translator and critic; Urvashi Butalia, the publisher and author; Jon Cook, Professor of Literature; and the journalist Amana Fontanella-Khan.

On the judging process, which resulted in a tie, Amit Chaudhuri, Chair of Judges, noted, “It’s not every day or even every year that, while judging a prize, you come across two works of exceptionally high quality, striking for their polish, originality, and accomplishment. We had a consensus early on in the final stages of judging that this is indeed what had happened with the inaugural Tibor Jones South Asia Prize. All of us agreed that splitting the prize was the fairest decision. That we have two terrific winners rather than one is a matter of celebration.”

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra added, “Both novels are superb pieces of writing and it seemed to be neck and neck all the way; a literary photo finish. Awarding the prize to both seemed like much the best decision. Anything else would have been unfair to the other.”

Rohit Manchanda, a Bioscience Professor at IIT Bombay, has published two books in the past including In the Light of the Black Sun, for which he won the Betty Trask Award. Upon learning of his triumph, Manchanda stated, “There is first the thrill of having one’s novel chosen for the prize by so very notable a panel of judges; and, no less importantly, tied to the prize comes the opportunity of the novel being represented by Tibor Jones Associates, a leading agency for literary fiction. The springboard towards publication that this arrangement offers is, to my mind, every bit as valuable as the prize itself, and Tibor Jones are to be complimented on building into the award this singular feature.”

Srikumar Sen, of Calcutta and long-time London-based journalist, has written for the Guardian and been the Boxing Correspondent for The Times. Sen added, “I am happy that the judges of the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize have decided to make a joint award – to Rohit Manchanda and me – for it gives me the double pleasure of sharing as well as winning. It has also inspired me to put a bit of jaldi into my next book, which is already on its way.”

Over 80 manuscripts were submitted by the October 2011 deadline by South Asian writers living around the world, with a shortlist of six announced on December 15, 2011. Submissions for the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize 2013 open in June.

The full shortlist of six contenders were:

Rasana Atreya

Sabyn Javeri

Vidya Madabushi

Rohit Manchanda

Hema S. Raman

Srikumar Sen

Shortlisted candidates are encouraged to apply for the Charles Pick Fellowship which includes six months concentrated writing time with access to a mentor on the faculty, worth £10,000 plus free accommodation at the University of East Anglia, one of the world’s best regarded creative writing programmes that boasts Booker Prize-winning novelists Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro as alumnae. The deadline to apply for the fellowship is January 31 2012, and the winner will be announced in May.

For more details:

> tiborjones.com/prizes/south-asia-prize

> facebook.com/TJSAprize

> uea.ac.uk/lit/fellowships/charles-pick-fellowship

Manuscripts by Rasana Atreya, Sabyn Javeri, Vidya Madabushi, Rohit Manchanda, Hema S.Raman, and Srikumar Sen have been selected for the shortlist.

The deadline for submissions was October 19, 2011 and open to any unrepresented South Asian writer with a completed draft of an unpublished novel. The TJSA Prize is unique in that it nurtures new unrecognized talent. An esteemed panel of literary and publishing professionals have been reviewing dozens of applications.

Sabyn Javeri

Sabyn Javeri was born in Pakistan and lives in London. She holds a Masters from Oxford University in Creative Writing. Her short stories have been published in Wasafiri, South Asian Review, Trespass and London Magazine amongst other literary journals. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies by Harper Collins, Feminist Press, Oxford University Press and Women Unlimited. Her short story, And the World Changed was the title story of an Award winning anthology published internationally in India, Pakistan and the United States. More recently her story, The Letter, a satire on the Pakistani Judicial system, won the Oxonian Review fiction competition.

She is an obsessive reader and likes to think of herself as an accidental writer. In the absence of libraries in her native Karachi, she decided to write her own stories. To maintain suspense, she left the endings to friends. Little did she know, this would become her writerly dilemma in the years to come.

ON THE PRIZE: “Tibor Jones have been pioneers since their inception and I hope that the inaugural South Asia Prize will continue to challenge and break the mould in true TJ tradition.”

EXCERPT FROM HER MS ‘ONCE WE WERE BEAUTIFUL’:

The day Papa died, it snowed in Karachi. Standing at the window I stared at the sight of tiny white ovals swirling to the ground, the hot sun shining through their whiteness. Forgetting my duppatta I ran down the stairs and out the door, the unbuttoned collar of my kurta, flapping in the wind.

It was the Magnolia tree, shedding its delicate pale petals. Breathless, I stood beneath my bedroom window looking up at the falling flowers, their dewy paleness colouring the landscape white. One white petal fell on my lips.

I picked up a few desolate ones from the ground and held them close to my chest. As I walked back towards the house I opened my palm and looked at the crushed flowers, beautiful even when broken. I entered the house and stood listening to the loud steady ticking of Papa’s Longcase clock, a sound one hardly ever noticed but missed if it stopped.

When I looked up again I saw Papa’s face, frozen in a half smile, eerily serene and still. The petals drifted from my grip.

Papa was gone, without so much as an apology.

Rasana Atreya

Based in Hyderabad, Rasana Atreya worked in the computer industry till the lure of writing proved too strong. Her next book will be about the antics of an eccentric grandfather, because her children have begged that the new book be something they can read.

ON THE PRIZE: “[The Tibor Jones South Asia Prize] is a wonderful opportunity for unpublished writers.”

EXCERPT FROM HER MS ‘TELL A THOUSAND LIES’:

“Good thing you aren’t pretty, Pullamma,” Lakshmi garu said with a laugh. “Can you imagine the headache if we had to hide you, too?”

I bit the inside of my cheek. Lakshmi garu was here to lend moral support for my older sister’s bride viewing and I mustn’t forget it.

“Towering like a palm tree, you are,” she said, “and skin dark like anything.”

I wondered if ‘garu’, as a term of respect, was wasted on this friend of my grandmother’s. But still. I was sixteen now, couldn’t let words escape my mouth without proper consideration.

Lakshmi garu considered me for a long moment, the wide slash of her mouth disappearing into the flat rectangle of her face. Shaking her head, she turned back to my grandmother.

It couldn’t be easy for our Ammamma, saddled as she was with three orphaned granddaughters, and no male support, to find us grooms. If today’s alliance for Malli fell through, where would we find another family willing to accept the limited dowry we had to offer?

Of the three of us, Malli was the most beautiful. But my fraternal twin, Lata, was pretty, too; for this reason she’d had been packed off to a relative’s house, out of sight. For, if the groom’s family got it into their heads to take her home as their daughter-in-law, it would be hard for us to refuse them. Given that Malli was the best looking, it was unlikely, but why take the risk? If they chose Lata over Malli, people would forever think there was some defect in Malli that had caused the groom’s family to reject her. Who would marry her then?

Now, as Ammamma, Lakshmi garu and I waited in our walled off courtyard for the prospective bridegroom’s family to grace us with their presence and decide if our Malli was good enough for them, I made a promise to Goddess Durga – if this alliance went through, I’d break coconuts at her altar.

Rohit Manchanda

Rohit Manchanda grew up in the coal-mining townships of eastern India and went on an Overseas Scholarship to university at Oxford, where he took a BA in the physiological sciences. He continued at Oxford on a British Heart Foundation studentship for his DPhil and is now a Professor in the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering at IIT Bombay, where he teaches and conducts research on electrical signalling in the nervous system. He has written two books before this, a novel and a book of institutional history. His novel, In the Light of the Black Sun, published by Penguin India in 1997, dealt with life in the coalfields of eastern India, a setting previously unexplored in literary fiction. It won a Betty Trask Award and attracted critical praise. His second book, Monastery, Sanctuary, Laboratory, is a narrative history of the first 50 years of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, where he works.

EXCERPT FROM HIS MS ‘A PLACE IN MIND’:

So here you are, finally, all of you, ranged before me. Each carrying into the sands of time some part of me, some just the smallest morsel, some, less shyly, good handfuls of me.

And I see myself, feature by accustomed feature, parcelled out into the faces, the tics, the tempers of those present here. A hawk’s high-bridged nose, or a helplessness against chafing one’s knees; a crocodile tooth, or a tell-tale jaw, silently clenching and unclenching.

Slipping away framewise, window by barred window, the countryside blurs past. Fields of rice and sugarcane, sun-and-swaying-shade, stream by, but not unbrokenly: they’re here and there clipped by low vagabond hills, inlaid far between with rainwater ponds.

My gaze roams, stutters. And as it comes to rest on each of these faces and figures, detachments of my own veins and nerves, scenes from times past flash and flicker before my eyes. Momentarily, they blot out the present, leaving the eyes looking still but only as a camera looks at the world, seeing nothing. And the sequences are themselves snuffed out just as rudely, one by one, as newformed ones burgeon up to take their place.

Within the carriage, sounds of a dozen strains rise and swirl, twining and untwining like a basket of snakes, the whole medley set off against the steel-drums orchestra of the train. From the far end of the compartment, a spray of chatter ripples across: chatter of the kind that flows between, as a rule, men alone. Comment and meditation: on the stock market; on the excruciatingness of the cricket being played in Calcutta; on the relative prettiness, on a salacious scale of ten, of that phenomenon still new to Indian TV, the waifish weather girls on the private channels; but, just at this moment, on cars.

Vidya Madabushi

Vidya Madabushi grew up in Tirupati and Bangalore in Southern India. She has degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing from Mt.Carmel College, Bangalore and the University of Sydney. In different periods of her life, Vidya has worked in advertising, volunteered for an NGO, trained as a carnatic vocalist and been employed as a technical writer. Vidya loves daydreaming on bus rides, has an irrational fear of lizards and wishes the game of cricket would grow longer, not shorter. She currently resides in Sydney with her husband and son.

ON THE PRIZE: “Callouts for unagented, unpublished and unheard of authors are rare. The existence of this prize is a recognition of the hundreds, if not thousands of such writers across South Asia, and as one such writer, this was a call I had to heed.”

EXCERPT FROM HER MS ‘BYSTANDERS’:

When I was five years old, my father told me that my mother had died of tuberculosis. By then I was already familiar with all the killer diseases: tuberculosis, typhoid, malaria, diphtheria, whooping cough (which only killed babies), and the stealthiest of them all- cholera. This was 1971. Neighbours counted the people who had died that year while drawing water from the well, fathers warned their children of which streets to avoid when there was an outbreak of jaundice, and in the summer, when the mosquitoes clung together and scratched at the white gauzy mosquito nets, mothers kept a fierce gaze on their babies.

Looking back now, if I were to put a finger on that spot in time where it all began, it would have to be the day I became Sorry Hari. Every memory of my childhood begins with this yellow day, sitting on the warm bench in the classroom with the sun blasting through the big iron windows. Beside me is Michael Pinto, the boy who sat very straight and was two long inches taller than me, and a green toffee wrapper sticks out of his breast pocket , bright and fluorescent against his white cotton shirt.

Michael Pinto’s socks were always at equal lengths on his shins. He was from Madras, and although we all wore identical uniforms, it was clear to everyone that he was a city boy. Only city boys sat that straight on their benches.

Hema S. Raman

Hema S. Raman’s works of fiction have won several prizes, including: Regional Winner (Asia) in 2007 CBA short story contest;
First prize in 2010 Katha India Currents short story contest; First prize in 2010 Sampad-British Council international writing contest.

The first chapter and synopsis of her novel were commended by ‘The Literary Consultancy’ in the contest held during the 2008 Jaipur Literary Festival. Her story was chosen as one among the honour list in 2010 Binnacle international short fiction contest. Her stories have been shortlisted in other contests and have also been published in several anthologies. She has attended the British Council creative writing trainers workshop conducted in November 2009 by the renowned author Louise Doughty and is a certified creative writing trainer. She lives in Chennai, India.

EXCERPT FROM HER MS ‘FEAR THE HERO’:

By late afternoon a faint moon lurked, while the winds rebuked slapping fine sand. We should have left the beach then but we stayed on. My Sari flapped like wings threatening to take off as I pushed my heavy braid back. It is so thick that it can be seen on both sides of my long neck. I staggered to the sea.

The sea was a chameleon. A blue curved line drawn with a dead steady hand at the horizon, turned muddy green with the waves. Drained of blues and greens, it donned a mosaic skin of grey and white as it receded. The black granite rock clusters near the shore churned the waves leaving soapy white foam trapped within the rocks. My children Anand and Anandi – black haired sand creatures scooped up the spumes in their small hands and blew at it, willing it to rise as it dissipated. Their uncle Maddy dipped into the sea trying to wash the sand away.

“Enough. Come out and play,” I said getting closer, but the wind stole my words before it could reach them. They waved to me, gestured that I should join them. I stopped being frantic and sat down close enough for the waves to touch my toes. Maddy would take care of them.He was back. Yes, back after nine long years.

Srikumar Sen

 Srikumar Sen was born in Calcutta. He moved to England in 1946 when his parents, who were journalists, were transferred to London. He continued his education in a London school and Oxford University, after which he joined the Times as a trainee. He married Eileen Hartwell, from South Africa, in 1955 and they went out to India, where he worked on the Statesman in Calcutta and then joined ICI (India) as head of the public relations department. They returned to England in 1965. He worked on the Guardian sports desk for a year before moving to the Times sports desk, where he remained for thirty years, becoming the Boxing Correspondent, a post he held for the last thirteen years of his service with the newspaper. He has three children, two boys and a girl.

ON THE PRIZE: “My thanks to Tibor Jones for setting up the South Asia Prize, which means that more South Asian authors will be given the chance of being read and considered by distinguished professors of literature and critics and so helped on the way to a writing career.”

EXCERPT FROM HIS MS ‘THE SKINNING TREE’:

Murder was the plaything of us kids. We fooled with the idea of killing like some kids fool with fire. We stood around in free time on the far side of the pitch, leaning against the wall or sitting on it kicking our boot heels against it, talking, talking about killing, killing someone, someone we didn’t like, how we would do it, killing was easy, no one would tell on you, because they wouldn’t, talking and bragging. Then one day it happened. Sister Man was found on the rocks below the school.

Fate was the igniter of the tragedy (Roper would say it was our dreams). It was monsoon time, when it rained day after day and the sky was low over the hills and swallows flew madly about. The rain watered the scrub plain below the school and ripened the jamuns and mangoes in the forest and the Alphonsos by the wall, where the foliage, heavy with rain, covered what lay beneath. The bhistis found her. As they started on their early evening toil, carrying water up to the school, they saw the half-clothed and bloodied figure of Sister Man lying on the rocks by the stony track they were on. Casting off their buffalo-skin burdens, they scrambled up the steep incline and ran to the Brothers’ bungalow, crying “Sister! Sister!”

It was at bedtime when Brother Prefect told us boys about Sister, that she had had an accident, a bad accident, and had been taken to hospital. She was very ill but we would pray for her recovery, he said. Did anyone know how it happened, he asked. We all shook our heads.
Nobody. But I knew. I couldn’t tell. How could I? Because I saw what was happening, the horror of it, and I ran away. I could have done something about it and I didn’t. I ran away. I was nine years of age at the time; it was during the war, which is why I was at that school.

For more details:

http://www.facebook.com/TJSAprize