Salman Rushdie, Jha get Commonwealth regional prizes

Salman Rushdie, Jha get Commonwealth regional prizes
EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE

NEW DELHI, FEB 21

Salman Rushdie and debutant Indian novelist Raj Kamal Jha have won the Commonwealth Writers Prizes for Eurasia.

The Ground Beneath her Feet bagged the Best Book award for Rushdie's ``exciting reanimation'' of the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Jha's The Blue Bedspread was Best First Book for ``zannily portraying the tense roster of personal and domestic horrors in an astonishingly rich scene of modern urban India.''

While Rushdie's novel is a story of love (lost, found, regained) across subcontinents, Jha's has its feet firmly in place in Calcutta and is described by jury chairperson Valentine Cunningham as a ``truly magicked kind of realism.'' Jha, an editor with The Indian Express, said the award was a ``happy accident on a creative journey.''

The 1,000-pound regional awards are given out yearly and culminate with the 10,000- and 3,000-pound prizes for the overall best book and best first book respectively.

Winning books in theregional category are sent to a pan-Commonwealth panel of judges. The entries for the awards _ instituted in 1987 _ are first assessed by regional panels of judges.

This year, the final judging panel will be chaired by Shashi Deshpande, Indian writer and columnist from Bangalore, and the awards will be given in New Delhi in April.