Daijiworld Media Network - Mumbai
Mumbai, Mar 2: Renowned author Jerry Pinto has bagged the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize instituted by the Yale University, USA.
The Prize, which carries a purse of $150,000, is awarded to English-language writers for their literary achievements or their potential. There is no submission process for the award, and writers are judged anonymously and unaware that they are in the running.
49-year-old Mumbai-based Jerry Pinto, best known for his novel 'Em and the Big Hoom' released in 2012, is among the winners in the fiction category. His writing was described by the jury as 'deeply empathetic, humorous, and humane, drawing on personal experience to tell stories much larger than the lives they contain'.
In conversation with a journalist of Scroll.in, Jerry Pinto expressed surprise at being chosen for the prestigious Prize and said, "...When my book came out in America, it didn't seem like it had shot to stardom. It had a few good reviews and that's about it. When one writes literary fiction, one knows it's not going to sell a tremendous amount, but this is really nice and really wonderful. It's almost as if someone is looking out for the interest of literature, which is nice." He also said he has no idea what he would do with the $150,000 prize money.
Jerry Pinto has visited Mangaluru twice and given interesting talks on literature. The first time, he was the speaker at the third James and Shobha Mendonca Endowment Lecture on Poetry organized by Kavita Trust in 2014, and recently, in November 2015, he delivered a talk on translation in poetry during Sahitya Samaroh organized by World Konkani Centre.
Apart from Jerry Pinto, the winners of the Windham-Campbell Prize are, in drama: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (United States), Hannah Moscovitch (Canada), and Abbie Spallen (Ireland); in fiction, Tessa Hadley (United Kingdom) and C E Morgan (United States); and in nonfiction, Hilton Als (United States), Stanley Crouch (United States), and Helen Garner (Australia).
Prize recipients will gather at Yale in September for an international literary festival celebrating their work, states a news published by the Yale University on its website.
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