Another young Indian is on his/her way to being discovered. e-Author 5.0, presented by Oxford Bookstore, which scouts out talent from all over the country, is underway in its fifth edition. Giving first-time writers a chance to get published and launched into the Indian literary scene, short story and novel extracts are being evaluated by an in-house team of experts.

Ten finalists will be chosen and sent to the judges, who will further shortlist six entries — three for the novel and three for the short story section. These short-listed winners will need to complete their novels and short story anthologies by August 18 for yet another round of judging. The two winners will finally be announced on September 30.

The winner of the novel-writing competition will bag Rs 50,000 in cash as well as get a chance to have his/her work published by HarperCollins, with excerpts up on the Oxford Bookstore website (www.oxfordbookstore.com). The winner of the short-story competition will win Rs 30,000 and get published in Reader’s Digest as well as in e-book format on the website.

“This is basically a writing programme to encourage people to choose a career in writing. By the end of the whole period, the short-listed candidates will have a full-length novel on their hands,” said Rajiv Chowdhry, CEO, Apeejay Oxford Bookstores.

The competition will be judged by a panel consisting of Antara Dev Sen, editor of The Little Magazine; Chris Gribble, chief executive of The New Writing Partnership (UK) and authors Jaishree Mishra and Pavan Varma; Mohan Sivanand, editor of Reader’s Digest, and Saugata Mukherjee, senior commissioning editor of HarperCollins India.