Tata Literature Live! Literary Awards 2020: Deepa Anappara, Annie Zaidi and TM Krishna among winners

The Tata Literature Live! Mumbai LitFest 2020 concluded its week-long maiden virtual edition by announcing the Tata Literature Live Awards. The awardees are:

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara (Penguin Random House) — Tata Literature Live! First Book Award - Fiction

Prelude to a Riot by Annie Zaidi (Aleph) — Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year Award – Fiction

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Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul by Taran N Khan (Penguin Random House) — Tata Literature Live! First Book Award – Non-Fiction

Sebastian & Sons: A Brief History of Mrdangam Makers by TM Krishna (Westland) — Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year Award - Non-Fiction 

The Making of Hero: Four Brothers, Two Wheels and a Revolution that Shaped India by Sunil Kant Munjal (HarperCollins) — Tata Literature Live! Business Book of the Year Award 

Penguin Random House — Tata Literature Live! Publisher of the Year Award

The jury for the 'Business Book' category gave a special mention to Excellence Has No Border: How A Doctorpreneur Created A World-Class Cancer Hospital Chain written by BS Ajaikumar with Hemanth Gorur.

Additionally, the Sultan Padamsee Playwright Award was presented by Raell Padamsee to Ram Ganesh Kamatham for his play Undaunted.

The session was hosted by actor Ratnabali Bhattacharjee, and the festival’s founder and director Anil Dharker mentioned in his closing remarks the extensive breadth of ideas the event tried to capture with its many diverse sessions. “Overall, Tata Literature Festival is a forum for free expression, and I repeat that because it is contrary to what some of you may have heard. It represents in a small way an idea of an enlightened and liberal India.”

Dharker’s words were likely in reference to the recent controversy surrounding the last minute cancellation of American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky and historian Vijay Prashad’s session on the former's latest work Internationalism or Extinction. This followed after the pair announced on social media that they would be airing their views on corporations such as Tatas, "and the Tatas in particular" at their session, after an appeal was made to them by activists and academics to boycott the festival, since it is sponsored by the Tata Group — a corporation with an alleged "long history of forceful displacement, human rights violations and environmental plunder", and that such events "are evidently an attempt to erase its crimes from the public consciousness – an ideological whitewashing," according to the letter.