Lahiri

London, March 12: Jhumpa Lahiri has been declared a regional winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for 2009 and will now go through into a sort of literary beauty contest to be held in New Zealand in May to find the overall victor.

In the Europe and South Asia region, the judges considered Jhumpa’s Unaccustomed Earth to be the Best Book, ahead of other contenders, including Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence; Shashi Deshpande’s The Country of Deceit; Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency; Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand; and David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence.

Jhumpa was born in London of Bengali parents, grew up in Rhode Island in the US, and now lives in New York with her husband and two children. Her novel, The Namesake, has been turned into a successful film by Mira Nair.

The chairman of the region’s judging panel, Makarand Paranjape (India), who made the decision jointly with Durre Sameen Ahmed (Pakistan) and Alex Tickell (UK), commented: “Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth emerged as the Best Book after some very tough competition from some extremely gifted, even extraordinary books, including Hensher’s magisterial survey of English suburbia in Northern Clemency and Rushdie’s fecund and fierce imagination in The Enchantress of Florence. But, in the end, Lahiri’s lyrical, meticulously crafted prose, with the moving and memorable treatment of the diasporic experience coupled with her significant achievement in extending the form of the short story, won the day.”

Rushdie

In the same region, the prize for Best First Book went to A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif, a Pakistani-origin BBC journalist in London.

He beat Sulaiman Addonia’s The Consequences of Love; Daniel Clay’s Broken; Joe Dunthorne’s Submarine; Murzaban F. Shroff’s Breathless in Bombay; and Rowan Somerville’s The End of Sleep.

Hanif’s tale revolves around the following plot: “Why did a Hercules C130, the world’s sturdiest plane, carrying Pakistan’s military dictator General Zia-ul Haq, go down on August 17, 1988?”

“Mohammed Hanif was a clear favourite, with his amazingly detailed and plausible portrayal of historical events, coupled with great political insight and stylistic virtuosity,” said Paranjape. “This book is also the first Pakistani novel to be a regional winner.”

Each of the regional winners from Africa, Canada and the Caribbean, and South East Asia and the Pacific, gets £1,000 and goes into the next stage of the competition to choose the Commonwealth Best Book and Best First Book winner, who receive £10,000 and £5,000, respectively.