Benyamin calls his novel “a metaphor for the world today, full of fanatics.”Īlthough born in India’s southern state of Kerala, Benyamin lived in Bahrain between 19, and those years inform his writings about the Gulf region. While Goat Days is about an abused migrant worker in Saudi Arabia, Jasmine Days is set against the dynamics of the Arab Spring, and is about a young woman in a Middle Eastern city in which the promise of revolution turns into destruction and division. Jurors for the inaugural prize, conferred on Wednesday evening in Delhi, are the novelist Vivek Shanbhag the writer Priyamvada Natarajan the entrepreneur and scholar Rohan Murty and author-translator Arshia Sattar.īenyamin, the winning author, is very popular in the region, a recipient of many awards whose best-known work is the 2008 novel Goat Days, originally published in serial form by the Mathrubhumi Illustrated Weekly, and later by Penguin (2012). In terms of corporate responsibility programs, JCB works in areas of education and vocational training, primarily. JCB is the manufacturer of earthmoving and construction equipment, a company with some 5,000 employees operating in Ballabgarh near New Delhi, in Pune, and in Jaipur. The prize has been created this year under novelist Rana Dasgupta’s literary direction not only to draw attention to contemporary Indian fiction, but also “to introduce readers to works of Indian literature in languages other than their own,” according to the program’s media messaging. The translator, Habib, also receives 500,000 rupees (US$6,823). Said to be the most generous prize in India today, the JCB carries a purse of 2,500,000 rupees or US$34,103 and includes a trophy titled Mirror Melting by the artists Thukral & Tagra. Image: Mullookkaaran, CC BY-SA 4.0īy Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | ‘A Metaphor for the World Today’ India’s new JCB Prize for Literature has been awarded in New Delhi to Benny Daniel, an author who writes as Benyamin and whose Jasmine Days is translated from the Malayalam into English by Shahnaz Habib and published by Chiki Sarker’s Juggernaut Books, a two-year-old mobile venture familiar to readers of Publishing Perspectives.

Jasmine days book