LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Call for Papers for a Special Volume on
Indian Writing in English - Analysis of Select Novels of 2009-2010

Editor of the Special Volume

G. Baskaran, Ph.D.

The Hindu Best Fiction Award 2010 for Indian Writing in English was announced on November 1, 2010. The Jury shortlisted 11 novels from out of 75 entries received for this competition. Publishers were eligible to send books published between June 2009 and June 2010 for the competition. The jury for the competition comprised Shashi Deshpande, novelist; Mukul Kesavan, author and essayist; Brinda Bose, academic and critic; and Jai Arjun Singh, literary critic. It is reported that "the shortlist was finalised by a panel of Chennai-based judges comprising Shreekumar Varma, novelist; K. Srilata, poet-academic; Parvathi Nayar, artist-critic; and Ranvir Shah, founder of the Prakiriti Foundation."

The shortlist includes the following novels, quoting from http://www.hindu.com/2010/10/30/stories/2010103054591700.htm (The serial number , bold and italics for the titles are added by me. The number given by me does not reflect any ranking order. - G. Baskaran).

1. Tabish Khair is Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Aarhus in Denmark. His book The Thing About Thugs is vying for the title. Mr. Khair's best known works include Babu Fictions (2001), The Bus Stopped (2004), which was shortlisted for the Encore Award (U.K.) and the poetry collection Where Parallel Lines Meet.

2. Poet, novelist and literary critic Anjum Hasan is shortlisted for Neti, Neti. Her other books are Lunatic in my Head (2007), a book of poems Street on the Hill (2006). Ms. Hasan is the Books Editor, The Caravan.

3. Kalpana Swaminathan, shortlisted for Venus Crossing, is a surgeon and writer. Apart from books in her own name, she shares the pseudonym Kalpish Ratna with Ishrat Syed.

4. Palash Krishna Mehrotra is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and writes a regular column for Mail Today. Eunuch Park is his first short story collection and he resides in Dehradun.

5. Upamanyu Chatterjee, shortlisted for Way to Go, is an author and an IAS officer. His published works include short stories and the novels English, August: An Indian Story (1988), The Last Burden (1993), The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000) which won the Sahitya Akademi Award for writing in English, and Weight Loss (2006).

6. Journalist and author Soumya Bhattacharya is shortlisted for If I could Tell You. Her first book was a work of narrative non-fiction called You Must Like Cricket.

7. Manjul Bajaj, shortlisted for Come, Before Evening Falls, is a part-time consultant on environment and development issues, a mother and homemaker.

8. Among the authors shortlisted for their debut works are Daisy Hasan for The To-Let House, which was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2008. She is from Meghalaya, teaches at the University of Cardiff, Wales and is interested in theatre and video films.

9. Manu Joseph is Deputy Editor of Open magazine and Serious Men is his debut novel.

10. Tishani Doshi is a poet, novelist, author, journalist and dancer. She worked with dancer and choreographer Chandralekha until the latter's death in 2006. The Pleasure Seekers is her shortlisted book.

11. Saraswati Park is Anjali Joseph's first novel. The author studied English at Trinity College, Cambridge and has taught English at the Sorbonne, Paris. More recently Ms. Joseph has been a Commissioning Editor for ELLE (India).

Of the 11 listed above, the Jury chose the item least described, described in a single line above, for the award: Manu Joseph for his Serious Men.

Language in India www.languageinindia.com plans to bring out a volume of analysis of these selected novels, considering them to be possibly the best of the crop for the period between June 2009 and June 2010. A competent set of people filtered out the best from the entries and the Jury selected the best from out of final 11 from their perspective. This provides us with some sense of levels of achievement in Indian Writing in English for the above period, even as these may reflect the ongoing maturation progress in the Indian Writing in English field.

1. The Volume will focus only on the above 11 novels. However, you are free to compare and contrast any of these novels with those published earlier, both in India and abroad.

2. You may choose one of the novels for your analysis. Or you may choose a few for a comparative/contrastive study.

3. Let your focus be on the basic features and their functions of the novels focused in this volume. In particular, you may deal with the plot, structure, narrative techniques, language and style, characterization, story relevance, and so on.

4. Literary analysis is a very wide field, but every analysis must adequately focus on what is found specifically in the object of study. Deriving conclusions should be based on the object studied.

5. Kindly note that the volume is intended to be objective analysis of these novels, not a mere narration of their stories. Unfortunately, often we come across articles which present mostly the story of the novels. If one wants to read the story of a novel, he or she should go to that novel straight. Our focus is objective analysis, not reproduction of the story of these novels.

6. Kindly follow the MLA Style Sheet strictly for citation inside the article and for the list of references at the end. No Bibliography is accepted. Only a section of references in which all the items cited in the body of the article will be presented as per the MLA Style Sheet.

7. Excessive, long and frequent quotes from other sources also amount to plagiarism. So, kindly do your best to paraphrase the ideas you've taken from other sources in your words and still cite the sources adequately.

8. In order to meet partially the cost of formatting, uploading, and maintaining the article in the Internet and for doing repairs when necessary, Language in India www.languageinindia.com charges Indian rupees 500 only per article.

9. Along with your article sent to me as an attachment to your e-mail, you also need to send a declaration of original research and a statement of willingness to pay the formatting fee.

10. You are most welcome to submit more than one article for inclusion in this volume.

11. All articles received for publication will be reviewed to assess their publication worthiness and the author will be informed about its acceptance or otherwise. Authors also may be asked to do necessary revision so that their articles could be reconsidered for publication.

12. Your articles must reach me soon. The original last date was December 15th so that the January issue of Language in India www.languageinindia.com could carry the volume for wide distribution. However, for various reasons, the last date is made flexible now, but articles must reach the special volume editor on or before March 15, 2011.

Kindly note that Language in India www.languageinindia.com is an international online monthly journals, published consistently every month for the last 10 years. It is published from Bloomington, MN, USA. Articles and other items published in Language in India www.languageinindia.com are indexed in 3 major databases: EBSCOHost, ProQuest (Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts) and MLA International Bibliography. It is also reproduced in the Directory of Open Access Journals, from Sweden. Language in India www.languageinindia.com receives over 475,000 visits every month and is accessed in 75 countries. Authors who publish their research in Language in India www.languageinindia.com come from many nations including India, USA, UK, Turkey, Bulgaria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, China, Nigeria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Jordan, Malaysia, Singapore, etc.

Please do not hesitate to write to me (rgbaskaran@gmail.com) or the Managing Editor of Language in India www.languageinindia.com (Dr. M. S. Thirumalai, languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com) if you need any further help, clarification and/or information.

With best wishes

G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
Member, Board of Editors, Language in India www.languageinindia.com
Editor-in-Chief, COLLEGE SADHANA
Associate Editor: Labyrinth
Associate Professor, Research Center in English
VHNSN College
Virudhunagar - 626 001
Tamilnadu, INDIA
rgbaskaran@gmail.com

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