Sahitya Akademi Awards 2019: Shashi Tharoor wins in English non-fiction category for An Era of Darkness

Shashi Tharoor has been conferred with the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in the English creative non-fiction category this year for his book, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, published in 2016.

On 18 December, the Sahitya Akademi shared a press release announcing the awards in 23 languages, with books across multiple categories — poetry (seven), novels (four), short stories (six), essays (three) and works of non-fiction (three).

PRESS RELEASE: Sahitya Akademi announced its annual Sahitya Akademi Award- 2019 in 23 languages today. @prahladspatel, @pspoffice, @MinOfCultureGoI, @ksraosahitya, @PIB_India, @MIB_India, @DDNational pic.twitter.com/KqDdWSnAnk

— Sahitya Akademi (@sahityaakademi) December 18, 2019

Other winners include Chinmoy Guha for his Bengali essay Ghumer Darja Thele, Cho Dharman’s Tamil novel Sool, V Madhusoodanan Nair’s Malayalam poetry book Achan Piranna Veedu.

The Sahitya Akademi Award, instituted by the National Academy of Letters, is considered one of the highest literary awards in the country, which honours the winners with an engraved copper-plaque, a shawl and prize amount of Rs 1,00,000.

In an interview to Firstpost in 2016, Tharoor said that in An Era of Darkness, he took “all the arguments conventionally made in favour of Empire and systematically countered them… There’s been a lot of self-justificatory mythologising in Britain about the colonial era. A lot of the popular histories of the British Empire in the last decade or two, by the likes of Niall Ferguson and Lawrence James, have painted it in rosy colours, and this needed to be challenged.”

The awards will be presented on 25 February 2020 in New Delhi.