The JCB Prize for Literature has shortlisted two original works and three translations: The Secret of More by Tejaswini Apte-Rahm (Aleph Book Company, 2022); The Nemesis by Manoranjan Byapari, translated from Bengali by V. Ramaswamy (Westland Books, 2023); Fire Bird by Perumal Murugan, translated from Tamil by Janani Kannan (Penguin Random House India, 2023); Mansur by Vikramajit Ram (Pan Macmillan India, 2022); and I Named my Sister Silence by Manoj Rupda, translated from Hindi by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar (Westland Books, 2023). It is an incredible Rs 25-lakh prize given annually to an outstanding piece of fiction written by an Indian writer. Srinath Perur, Somak Ghoshal, and Kavery Nambisan are among the jurors.

The works of Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar and Tejaswini Apte are debuts in their respective fields.

On November 18, the winner will be revealed. A further monetary award of Rs 10 lakh will be given to the translator if their entry is the winning one

In addition, the translator of a shortlisted piece gets Rs 50,000, and the five authors on the shortlist each receive Rs 1 lakh.

Commenting on the shortlist, the chair of the 2023 jury, Srinath Perur said, “In our shortlist meeting we reluctantly set out to eliminate five books from the longlist of ten. It turned out that every book on the longlist was a serious shortlist candidate for at least one jury member. But in the end there were exactly five books that all five of us wanted on the shortlist. None of the books was easy to let go of, and those that made the cut did so by the jury’s unanimous decision.”

This is the sixth edition of this prize.