Jayant Kaikini wins 2018 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature

Jayant Kaikini, renowned Kannada poet short-story writer, columnist and playwright and lyricist, has won the prestigious 2018 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for ‘No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories’ at the Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet. The novel is a collection of short stories set in Mumbai dating back to the 1980s. It offers a fine-grained, ground-up view of arguably India’s greatest metropolis. The book was originally written in the southern Indian language of Kannada and translated into English by the award-winning translator Tejaswini Niranjana. The $25,000 (£19,100) prize rewards the best writing about south Asian culture from writers of any ethnicity and from all over the world, will be split equally between author and translator. It will be split equally between author and translator. No Presents Please is the first work in translation to win the award in the prize’s eight-year history.