Winners

Special mentions

(Each translator wins a special mention prize of INR 5,000)

6/12/2023, Wednesday

Announcing the longlist for the Mozhi Prize 2023!

We are delighted to announce the longlist for the Mozhi Prize 2023. We received 188 unique entries, which was more than double the submissions we received in the first edition of the prize last year. While the most represented languages were along expected lines (Hindi, Tamil, Bangla and Malayalam), it was encouraging to receive submissions from 18 different source languages, including less visible languages such as Kashmiri, Bhojpuri, and Nepali. 

In arriving at a longlist, we gave equal weightage to the quality of the translation—particularly looking for translations with creative, inventive solutions to problems posed by the source text—as well as the aesthetic quality of the story selected for translation. In general, we believe we have identified translations that we thought were sensitive to the verbal and emotional nuances of the original story and attempted to render the artistry of the original in English. 

At the end of the reading period, we are very happy to share that we have a longlist of 26 superb stories from across languages, geographies, and time periods. Congratulations to the longlisted translators! Stay tuned for the shortlist announcement later this month. 

The Mozhi Prize 2023 – Longlist

Jenny Bhatt

My experience as a jury member for the Mozhi Prize’s second edition has been a journey of discovery across India’s diverse narratives, each entry a unique world inviting deep exploration and rich discussion. Navigating this exhilarating range of creativity required balancing the weights of subjectivity and responsibility to distill each translation’s technical brilliance as well as that ineffable spark so hard to quantify in any kind of ranking or scoring. It has been a privileged and humbling reaffirmation of the enduring power of Indian literature to transcend linguistic, temporal, and geographical boundaries. Speaking of the latter, when it was pointed out that the translations were more technically skilled as we traveled from the South to the North (there are various sociopolitical reasons for this, which we can discuss another time), it struck me that the stories themselves got more interesting as we traveled from the North to the South. Something for all of us to ponder further.

One such technically proficient translation from the North was the Hindi-to-English translation of Nirmal Verma’s ‘A Sliver of Sunlight’ by Sangeetha Balakrishnan. Written in second-person voice, it is a near-monologue by a nameless, enigmatic woman on a park bench, observing the events around a nearby church. Through her musings, she touches on the park’s transient nature, the anonymity of people’s lives, and the paradoxes of human experiences like marriage, loneliness, the passage of time, and more. Sangeetha demonstrates a smooth capability in conveying the wistful tone of this woman’s introspection as she unravels her own tale while hinting at a disintegrating marriage, haunting memories, and the quest for solace. When we finish the English translation, what lingers from all those reminiscences and the narrator’s farewell is the glimmer of warmth amid all of life’s coldness. This is a classic Verma device, but it is not so easy to communicate such that it resonates just as well in another language. Sangeetha has expertly modulated the narrator’s pitch and tone throughout the piece, much like a music composer, to ensure that the right notes stand out in the right places.

My personal bias for story drew me to this work from the South: The Tamil-to-English translation of A. Muttulingam’s ‘The Elephant’s Salary,’ by Jyoshitaa Mahendrarajan Lavanya. The story is about a charismatic and resourceful individual who rises from a low-level job to an influential position in Sri Lanka. He’s known for solving problems, often causing some, too. He weaves truth and lies seamlessly. His unconventional ideas, like bringing an elephant to expedite deforestation, bring success but also chaos. He’s a master manipulator, adept at bending rules and creating mischief. Despite his faults, his influence grows, reaching governmental positions and leaving others perplexed about his unpredictable rise. The narrative is intricate, blending humor, sharp dialogue, plot twists, vivid imagery, political nods, etc. Despite a few technical missteps, the translator commendably maintains Muttulingam’s signature style of reserved, understated drama. I was so immersed that I could envision it as a movie. Jyoshitaa, a fifteen-year-old first-time translator from Canada, displays promising talent, and I look forward to reading more such works.

Rahul Soni

Judging any sort of literary prize is always a very subjective enterprise, and as part of a jury one also then must weigh, balance and negotiate multiple subjectivities to arrive at a list that, more or less, all judges can agree on. Judging for the Mozhi Prize 2023 was no different, and the conversations with N.S. Madhavan, Jenny Bhatt, Suchitra Ramachandran and Priyamvada Ramkumar, I found were fruitful and enlightening – pointing to different ways and approaches of reading a story, and especially a story in translation.

While this is a prize for a story in translation, and the quality of the translation was the major factor, we had all agreed that we would also be considering the qualities, inasmuch as this was possible to judge in translation, of the story itself, and the choice of story taken up for translation. The final shortlist is reflective of these factors. And admittedly, it was a very, very close contest between the top three.

Mithila R.’s translation of Mannu Bhandari’s Hindi story ‘Akeli’ (as ‘The Lonely Woman’) was an especial favourite of mine. Mannu Bhandari is, of course, a modern master of Hindi prose (and not translated enough) and even though its concerns and theme might perhaps feel slightly dated and even almost cliched now, this was a superbly executed narrative, the pacing, the characters, the build-up to its heart-breaking denouement all perfectly gauged. And the translation stood out from the first reading as one of the very few submissions where the experience of reading the English translation was not just ‘seamless’ – in the sense that one didn’t find oneself constantly being made aware of the fact that one was reading a translation, one could ‘lose’ oneself in the story – but also one where the English text could be said to possess literary qualities in its own right. That is the standard that all literary translations should be aiming for, and truth be told, translations from Indian languages, by and large, unpublished or published, still fall far short of it.

Which is why it is heartening to see, and why it’s so important to have, contests like the Mozhi Prize that encourage new translators and give them a chance to see how they stack up, what they do well, where they fall short, and provide incentive to improve. I’d like to single out another translation – ‘Still Eye’, Remitha Satheesh’s rendering of a Tamil short story by Ajithan – while this made it to the shortlist, it didn’t find itself in the top three, yet the translation stood out for me in the way it was able to convincingly capture mood and voice, rather than just conveying meaning sentence by sentence.

It was a pleasure and a privilege being involved with the prize this year, and I look forward to seeing what texts the winning and shortlisted translators decided to work on next, as also to the new talents the prize uncovers in the coming years.

N.S. Madhavan

Literary translation had never had it so good as in the last two decades. English translators from Indian languages won prizes or got themselves regularly featured in short-lists of prestigious literary contests, competing with works in English. Mozhi’s Suchitra and Priyamvada Ramkumar’s decision to enlarge linguistic catchment area of the Mozhi Prize, from Tamil only, to all Indian languages, could not have come at a better time.

To literary translators, this must be an exciting contest; their universe is the entire body of short stories in their language. In its wake, this abundance brings in a problem too: the choice of story. That sort of became a give away of translators’ intentions, whether they wanted to go for a more challenging source story, or are satisfied to pluck low hanging fruits.

Dr. Sana R. Chaudhry’s translation of the late Fahmida Riaz’s story, ‘Flight of Birds’ is an example of bravery of choice. At one level, the story is about the making of an Urdu dictionary, where use of Urdu words and phrases become inescapable. A feeble-hearted translator would have tucked the story into a box labelled ‘untranslatable’, and moved on. But not Dr. Chaudhry; she found innovative devices to overcome these seemingly insurmountable difficulties, and in a different tongue, presented Fahmida Riaz in all her elegance and subtlety.

I admit there is some lop-sidedness in the selection of stories figuring in the short-list and prizes. These stories come from only a handful of languages, disregarding the babel that is India. The jury didn’t look to make the list ‘representational’; our focus was on  the story and its translation. I am mentioning this because, in the larger context, it is a concern that begs for creative solutions.

We had read a wide range of submissions, from Tagore and Premchand, to up-and-coming writers. As we moved up the time scale of stories’ content, to more recent times, they started going urban. This is where I wish to commend Kum. Veerabhadrappa’s story, ‘Sootaka’, translated by Srikar Raghavan, where rural Karnataka is presented in all its rawness as the background to a complexly woven story.

As a member of the jury of the Mozhi Prize 2023, I was privileged to journey through a wonderful world of stories from the subcontinent; each one, a slice of reality, mirroring ethos of a region in a particular time and to take in flavour of language spoken there. Thank you, Mozhi.

We are delighted to announce the shortlist of the Mozhi Prize 2023. Congratulations to all the shortlisted translators!

The winners of the Prize will be announced within a week. Please follow our page and our Twitter (X)/Instagram handle @mozhispaces for updates. Thank you!

The Mozhi Prize 2023 – Shortlist

Hello, and we hope your new year is off to a great start!

After a whirlwind reading period and many discussions with our judges, we have finally reached the end of the Mozhi Prize 2023. 

During the inaugural edition of the Prize, in 2022, we had limited our focus to Tamil-English translations, a milieu that the two of us are relatively more familiar with. It was envisioned as a pilot attempt to explore the idea of “discovering” new talent in translation and serving as an impetus for such talent to engage further with the art form. We started tentatively, but even we were surprised with the outcome. Nine emerging translators were featured on our 2022 shortlist. Since then, five of them have gone on to work on book-length works. A couple have enrolled in translation-focused mentorship programs, and one of them started a translation-focussed podcast too. Encouraged by these trends we decided to open up the 2023 competition, as we intended, to emerging translators from all Indian languages who translate into English.

We launched the competition in mid-August, and closed entries by mid-October. During that time we received 188 entries in total, a whole 100% more than last year. While the most represented languages were along expected lines (Hindi, Tamil, Bangla and Malayalam), it was encouraging to receive submissions from 18 different source languages, including less visible languages such as Kashmiri, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, and Nepali. The highest number of entries were from Tamil (44), followed closely by Malayalam(38), Hindi (32), Kannada (19) and Bangla (19). The age range of the translators was also interesting. While there was a slight skew towards the younger side, with roughly 60% of the entries submitted from translators under 40, age seems to have no bearing on the interest and attention bestowed on translation. The oldest entrant to our competition this year was 80 and the youngest, 13. 

61% of the translators who submitted entries identified as women, 36% as men and 1% as non-binary. While a majority of entrants (85%) reside in India, we also received entries from translators who live in the UK, USA, Australia, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Singapore, and Pakistan.  Interestingly we also had one author feature in the competition both as a translator and a translated writer. We think all these trends augur well for the future of translation in India.

This time, we also made the decision to not impose a limit on the time period of the short stories selected for translation: we reasoned that this would give the translators the maximum bandwidth to curate stories to share with us, and allow retranslations as a way to breathe new life into classic stories. While a good number of translators (~57%) picked stories published after the year 2000, we received quite a few stories from the 80s or earlier, as well as a sample of early short stories from the late 1800s. The types of stories were variegated—from a Gujarati folktale written by Jhaverchand Meghani, to a modernist relationship story by Telugu writer Tripura, to a postmodern short story written in the folk idiom by Tamil author Ki. Rajanarayanan. We were reading stories written by figures ranging from classic writers like Tagore (Bangla) and Lakshminath Bezbaruah (Assamese), to contemporary writers like Akhil K (Malayalam), Suneel Krishnan (Tamil) and Kinshuk Gupta (Hindi). For the two of us, reading through the stack was like an immersion into a 100+ year history of the Indian short story. 

One wish we have for future editions is for the rights acquisition process to become a lot easier for a first-time translator. A number of translators in our competition struggled to identify the rights holder, or where they had identified one, to find an audience with the rights holder. While it is germane for rights holders to be wary and protective of the way the story is represented in translation, we wish that they would be more open and embracing of the process itself. If we are to encourage new talent in translation, this is an issue that needs immediate attention from the ecosystem of writers and publishers. 

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The two of us read all the 188 submissions between us. As announced, we took into account both the quality of the original story and the quality of the translation craft in arriving at a longlist. While this is a translation prize, we firmly believe in the curatorial role of translators. In the long run, we do hope that the Mozhi Prize, while creating a shortlist of emerging translators of promise, will also throw a spotlight on short stories of top artistic merit from various Indian languages. Using this criteria, we arrived at a longlist of 26 entries. Our panel of judges, NS Madhavan, Rahul Soni and Jenny Bhatt each read all 26 entries and arrived at the shortlist using the same criteria. Each of the judges weighed the translation craft / story curation aspects differently, with the curation aspect weighing no more than 50% of the total score for any one judge. We were personally heartened by the attention and care with which the judges debated the merits of each story and translation in deciding on the shortlist and the winners. You can read more about their experience here. We thank the judges for their generosity of time and attention to the Mozhi Prize. 

In addition to the winners, each judge picked out one story that they thought was worthy of a special mention. We are especially thrilled to share that one of them is a translation by a fifteen year old who has since been interviewed about being longlisted for the Mozhi Prize. This really made our day! 

Our congratulations to all the winners and special mentions!! We will soon publish the winning entries, stay tuned to read the stories and learn more about the authors.

– Team Mozhi