Vinod Kumar Shukla's Blue is Like Blue wins inaugural Mathrubhumi Book of Year Award 2020

The inaugural Mathrubhumi Book of Year Award 2020 has been awarded to Vinod Kumar Shukla's Blue Is Like Blue, translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai, and published by HarperCollins India. The literary award was announced late last year and comes with a cash prize of Rs 5 lakh and a memento.

The book was selected by a jury panel including Dr Shashi Tharoor, Chandrashekhara Kambara and Dr Sumana Roy. While declaring the award, Roy commented that had he been a European, Shukla would have been a world renowned writer now. The award will be presented by Booker Prize jury member Margaret Busby today evening at the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters (MBIFL), held at Thiruvananthapuram from 30 January to 2 February, 2020.

Set in a small North Indian town, Blue is Like Blue is a collection of short stories detailing the 'smaller-than-life people' who all live in inherent fear about their situation. Concerns include a shortage of money, the fear of being overcharged, and a preoccupation with just getting along each day, still finding joy as they go about life.

"By being perhaps India’s most unglamorous writer, the writer in rubber chappals who makes his home in Raipur where a flock of ducks looks like a duck, Vinod Kumar Shukla is glamorous in a different way. He turns the world’s attention away from himself to his writing, which is as down to earth as it is magical and which has now, with the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award, been given national recognition," said the translators Mehrotra and Rai about the award.

Blue Is Like Blue was also awarded the Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize 2019 for Best Fiction.