In the crossfire for the award

The Hutch Crossword shortlist is a battle for three Rs 3 lakh cash prizes.

The shortlist for the Hutch Crossword awards have been announced, which means that 37 titles on the fiction longlist, 10 on the translation longlist and a whopping 59 on the non-fiction longlist have been pared down to just six books in each category.

The winners will be felicitated at an awards ceremony in March. Each award carries a cash prize of Rs 3 lakh (in the translation category, this is to be shared by the author and translator) as well as a trophy and a citation.

The awards, which aim to become an Indian equivalent of the Booker Prize, began life as the Crossword Award in 1998, when I Allan Sealy's The Everest Hotel won the only prize handed out that year.

In 1999 a second category for translations was introduced. The awards took a sabbatical between 2001-2004 but then reemerged last year in a new avatar with Hutch as a co-promoter.

The non-fiction category came into existence only this year. Other previous winners include Vikram Seth's An Equal Life, Jamyang Norbu's The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes and Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide.

This year's shortlist:
English fiction
The Tiger Claw "" Shauna Singh Baldwin
Tokyo Cancelled "" Rana Dasgupta
Surface "" Siddharth Deb
The Radiance of Ashes "" Cyrus Mistry
Magic Seeds ""V S Naipaul
Shalimar the Clown "" Salman Rushdie

(No clear favourites: Naipaul and Rushdie may be the heavyweights but the books they have been nominated for scarcely represent their best work. Interestingly, Picador India has a high representation in this category, given the relatively small scale of its publishing.)

English non-fiction One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices "" Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar
Pundits from Pakistan: On Tour with India 2003-04 "" Rahul Bhattacharya
Finding Forgotton Cities: How the Indus Civilisation was Discovered "" Nayanjot Lahiri
Maximum City "" Suketu Mehta
Diddi: My Mother's Voice "" Ira Pande
Chasing the Monk's Shadow: A journey in the footsteps of Xuanzang "" Mishi Saran

(Maximum City has the momentum but Diddi and Pundits From Pakistan are the dark horses. Shock exclusion: Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indian.)

Indian language fiction translation
A Dying Banyan "" Manzoor Ahtesham (translator Kuldip Singh)
Sangati "" Bama (translator Lakshmi Holmstrom)
After Kurukshetra "" Mahasweta Devi (translator Anjum Katyal)
The Unspoken Curse "" V K Madhavan Kutty (translator Prema Jaya Kumar)
The Survivors "" Gurudial Singh (translator Rana Nayar)

The Heart Has Its Reasons "" Krishna Sobti (translators Reema Anand and Meenakshi Swami)