London: Indian writer Annie Zaidi was Wednesday announced as the 2019 winner of the USD 100,000 Nine Dots Prize, a prestigious book prize created to award innovative thinking that addresses contemporary issues around the world.
Mumbai-based Zaidi, a freelance writer whose work includes reportage, essays, short stories, poetry and plays, won for her entry ‘Bread, Cement, Cactus’ – combining memoir and reportage to explore concepts of home and belonging rooted in her experience of contemporary life in India.
“What really appealed to me about the Nine Dots Prize was the way it encourages entrants to think without borders or restraints. My work has often crossed over genres, traversing between memoir and journalism, and this timely but wide-open question encouraged us to approach it with methods that were equally far-ranging,” said the 40-year-old winner.
Now in its second cycle, the prize challenged entrants to answer the question ‘Is there still no place like home?’ in a 3,000-word essay. The winner of the Nine Dots Prize is supported to develop their response into a full-length book, which is published by Cambridge University Press (CUP), and given the opportunity to spend a term at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge University.
“I had been working towards a similarly themed project for a while but didn’t have the financial, or even mental, bandwidth to do it justice. The Prize will allow me to dedicate time to the examination of this question, which is of critical importance in the modern world – and it will help fund the necessary research trips, which, as a freelancer, is something I appreciate hugely,” said Zaidi, who works on fiction, scripts and columns for magazines and newspapers.
She has published both fiction and non-fiction, including a collection of essays ‘Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales’, which was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award in 2010, and ‘Love Stories # 1 to 14′ – a collection of short fiction published in 2012.
Her new proposed book, based on her Nine Dots Prize winning essay ‘Bread, Cement, Cactus’, will be published by CUP in May 2020 and will answer the central question through examining how a citizen’s sense of “home” might collapse, or be recovered. The varied themes it will address include the politics and economics of death in India, the crossing of caste and religious lines in marriage, and the Partition of India as a great cultural and emotional sundering.
PTI