Sanjana Thakur, a 26-year-old writer from Mumbai and now based in Austin, Texas, has been named the winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2024 in London.
Thakur saw off 7,359 entrants worldwide to take the £5,000 prize, announced last week at an online award ceremony presented by New Zealand’s former Poet Laureate, Dr Selina Tusitala Marsh.
Sanjana’s story, ‘Aishwarya Rai’, takes its name from the famed Bollywood actress and reimagines the traditional adoption story: a young woman, Avni, chooses between possible mothers housed in a local shelter. The first mother is too clean; the second, who looks like the real-life Aishwarya Rai, is too pretty. In her small Mumbai apartment with too-thin walls and a too-small balcony, Avni watches laundry turn round in her machine, dreams of stepping into white limousines, and tries out different mothers from the shelter. One of them must be just right.
Thakur said: “I’ve spent ten out of twenty-six years living in countries not my own. India, where I’m from, is simultaneously strange and familiar, accepting and rejecting. Writing stories is a way for me to accept that Mumbai is a city I will long for even when I am in it; it is a way to remake ‘place’ in my mind.
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“I am so thankful to the judges, my fellow shortlisted writers, and the other regional winners for writing beautiful stories. For my strange story—about mothers and daughters, about bodies, beauty standards, and Bombay street food—to find such a global audience is thrilling. I cannot express how wholly honoured I am to be the recipient of this incredible prize. I hope I continue writing stories that people want to read. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Chair of the Judging Panel, said: “The short story form favours the brave and the bold writer. In ‘Aishwarya Rai’, Sanjana Thakur employs brutal irony, sarcasm, cynicism and wry humour packaged in tight prose and stanza-like paragraphs to confront us with the fracturing of family and the self as a result of modern urban existence. No matter which city you live in, you’ll recognise the stress-induced conditions like insomnia, restless leg, panic attacks and an obsession with a celebrity kind of beauty, in this this case, Bollywood.
“Thakur pushes this stinging absurdity as far as to suggest hiring mothers to replace inadequate ones. Rarely do we see satire pulled off so effortlessly.”
O Thiam Chin, Judge for the Asia region, added: “The power of Sanjana Thakur’s story reminds us that the best of fiction peels back the hard skin of life and grants us the privilege of feeling every flutter and pulse of its raw, quivering heart.”
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Besides India, the winning regional stories carry readers from a small village in Trinidad to a lonely motel in New Zealand via northern Canada and Mauritius, with themes ranging from love and loss, troubled relationships with parents, and a woman’s love of tea. Two draw upon historical events, the 2023 wildfires in Canada, and the day electricity came to a remote village in Trinidad.
The literary magazine ‘Granta’ has published all the regional winning stories of the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
*Info: ‘Aishwarya Rai’