Stabroek News reports that Indian author Rahul Bhattacharya has won a prize awarded by The Hindu newspaper for Best Fiction of 2011 for The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (2011).
The book tells of a young Indian’s Caribbean adventures in the company of a Guyanese diamond-seeker. According to The Hindu, The Sly Company of People Who Care won the prize for “its consummate artistry, its refusal to exoticise India—or Guyana … and its non-judgmental attitude to the characters.”
In presenting the prize to the Delhi-based author, writer and MP Shashi Tharoor said it was important to support the efforts of The Hindu to celebrate good writing in English in fiction, particularly as the challenge of getting people to read in an increasingly television-dominated culture was a formidable one. Accepting the award, Bhattacharya, who is also a cricket writer, joked that he was feeling a bit like (Mohinder) Amarnath running through the West Indies line-up in 1983. The writer first visited Guyana on a cricket assignment and returned on another occasion.
Description: In flight from the tame familiarity of home in Bombay, a twenty-six-year-old cricket journalist chucks his job and arrives in Guyana, a forgotten colonial society of raw, mesmerizing beauty. Amid beautiful, decaying wooden houses in Georgetown, on coastal sugarcane plantations, and in the dark rainforest interior scavenged by diamond hunters, he grows absorbed with the fantastic possibilities of this new place where descendants of the enslaved and indentured have made a new world. Ultimately, to fulfill his purpose, he prepares to mount an adventure of his own. His journey takes him beyond Guyanese borders, and his companion will be the feisty, wild-haired Jan.
In this dazzling novel, propelled by a singularly forceful voice, Rahul Bhattacharya captures the heady adventures of travel, the overheated restlessness of youth, and the paradoxes of searching for life’s meaning in the escape from home.
See book reviews in previous posts Book review: A portrait of Guyana and its polyglot idiom and Into the Heart of Guyana and at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/books/review/book-review-the-sly-company-of-people-who-care-by-rahul-bhattacharya.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
For more information, see http://www.stabroeknews.com/2011/news/breaking-news/10/30/indian-writer-wins-award-for-guyana-fiction/ and http://www.amazon.com/Sly-Company-People-Who-Care/dp/0374265852
