Pallavi Aiyar, Business Standard’s correspondent based in Brussels, has won the Popular Award at the Vodafone Crossword Popular Book Award for her Smoke & Mirrors. The Popular Award, introduced three years ago, offers readers the opportunity to vote for their favourite book.
Amitav Ghosh, for his Sea of Poppies, and Neel Mukherjee, for his Past Continuous, jointly won in the English Fiction category at the Vodafone Crossword Book Award 2008, announced at a ceremony in New Delhi on Thursday.
Curfewed Nights by Basharat Peer won in the English Non-Fiction category. T’TA Professor by Manohar Shyam Joshi (translated by Ira Pande) was declared the winner in Indian Language Fiction Translation. The book is originally written in Hindi. Aiyar’s book is a combination of travelogue, reportage, and memoir from the six years she spent in China, where she went to teach English news writing and — as she once recalled — found it difficult to tell Chinese students the difference between news and propaganda.
This year, the Award received an enthusiastic response from Indian publishers, with 176 valid entries coming in for the three categories.
