Malayalam novel Jasmine Days by Benyamin wins inaugural JCB Prize for Literature

New Delhi: Malayalam novel Jasmine Days by Benyamin that was translated in English by Shahnaz Habib has won the inaugural JCB Prize for Literature. 

A jury of Rohan Murthy, founder of the Murty Classical Library, the theoretical astrophysicist and author Priyamvada Natarajan, translator and scholar Arshia Sattar, and novelist-playwright Vivek Shanbhag chose the novel from submissions made by 42 publishers in eight languages to win the Rs 25 lakh prize. Habib won a prize of Rs 5 lakh for her translation.

The winning entry was chosen from among a shortlist of five novels including Anuradha Roy’s All the Lives We Never Lived, Subhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing, Amitabha Bagchi’s Half the Night is Gone and Perumal Murugan’s Poonachi, translated from the Tamil by N Kalyan Raman.

Jasmine Days tells the story of Sameera Parvin, a young Pakistani woman who works as a radio jockey in a Middle Eastern country and also addresses the lives of foreign workers in a country that is on the brink of a revolution.