For the second time in three years, the winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize has a strong connection to Goa and the Goa Arts + Literary Festival. As with 'Taj Mahal Foxtrot', the 2012 Prize winner by Naresh Fernandes, The Scatter Here is Too Great by Bilal Tanweer had its exclusive international release at GALF (in conversation with Ranjit Hoskote last year). See the video here: http://youtu.be/T38gI1i_3b4?list=PLyergfuC1KUToli2EQIjxuLRGj3F7kWSC
http://forshakti.blogspot.in/2014/11/bilal-tanweer-wins-2014-shakti-bhatt.html Lahore-based author Bilal Tanweer has won the 2014 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize for his novel The Scatter Here Is Too Great (Random House India). In its seventh year, the prize money has been increased to Rs 2 lakhs with support from Priti Paul and the Apeejay Trust. This year's judges were authors Amit Chaudhuri, Aatish Taseer and Mridula Koshy (2009 winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize). On behalf of the judges, Taseer said: “The Scatter Here Is Too Great is that rarest of rare things: a novel whose form is a near perfect expression of its content. Karachi’s violence, its desolation, its dirt and phantasmagoria, are not merely represented; they inspire the shape of this jolting, fragmentary, darkly kaleidoscopic novel. It is part of Bilal Tanweer’s promise that he can leave so much unsaid, that his negative spaces speak as eloquently as they do. And, in the end, the reader is left with all that he needs to know—a deep and inconsolable sense of unease.”
