Atta Galatta Book Prizes 2020: Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, The Death Script among winners

The Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prizes 2020 were announced on 8 December. The awards highlight the central tenet of the festival: a connection to community.

The winning authors share a total prize amount of Rs 50,000 among themselves, scaled down from previous years’ Rs 2 lakh prize because of the pandemic and subsequent disruptions in the publishing industry. The winners also receive the Thought Beyond Words trophy, designed by architect TS Ramani Sankar and made by Sampath Appasamy of Artistick’s Art Forum.

The winners are:

Fiction

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara (Penguin Hamish Hamilton)

Non Fiction

The Death Script: Dreams and Delusions in Naxal Country  by Ashutosh Bhardwaj (4th Estate - HarperCollins)

There’s also a Popular Choice award allocated through a special reader-based jury, selected on the basis of an online poll which is open to readers across the world. This year, it was awarded to Made in India: A Memoir by Milind Soman with Roopa Pai (Penguin eBury).

Additionally, an annual award is presented for Literary Achievement in Kannada, celebrating the work and contribution of Kannada writers to the language. In 2020, it has been awarded to writer Vaidehi.

Best Cover Design is a new category instituted in 2020. It was won by Ahlawat Gunjan for his cover for  Rising Heat  by Perumal Murugan (Penguin Hamish Hamilton).

The Atta Galatta prizes for English-language writing were instituted in 2015, accepting translations and self-published books as well. Atta Galatta is an independent bookstore in Bengaluru. The literature festival will be held on 12 and 13 December at the Bangalore International Centre and also be live-streamed.

The 2019 prize for Best Fiction was awarded to Vinod Kumar Shukla for his book Blue is Like Blue, translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai, and published by HarperCollins India.