Director's Cut

Rana Dasgupta, author and literary director of the JCB Prize for Literature, tells us how the plush new award, the richest of its kind, will move mountains for Indian literature

- Rana Dasgupta

What sets the JcB Prize apart from the existing literary awards?

For starters, the prize money (`25 lakh) is a marker of the significance we’ve attached to literature from India. It’s restricted to Indian citizens too, which surprises those who attach “Indian literature” with, say, Jhumpa Lahiri – but the idea is to give people a cohesive idea of what’s going on in the country. Which is also why we’ve put a lot of emphasis on translation: Indian literature is multilingual. So we have a secondary prize (`5 lakh) for the translator, should the winning title be a translation.

But we’re also not about just handing a cheque to an author. We have a large marketing budget to get a conversation going around their work and, through it, Indian literary fiction. Take the Booker Prize: The prize money is £50,000, while the annual budget is actually about £1.5 million. The Booker-winning titles’ sales multiply 8-10 times. It’s that sort of impact that we’re trying to create.