LONDON: Sanjana Thakur, a 26-year-old writer from Mumbai, beat competition from over 7,359 entrants worldwide to be named the winner of the GBP 5,000 Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2024 in London on Thursday.
Sanjana’s story entitled ‘Aishwarya Rai’ takes its name from the famed Bollywood actress to reimagine and reverse the traditional adoption story.
The literary magazine ‘Granta’ has published all the regional winning stories of the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
“I cannot express how wholly honoured I am to be the recipient of this incredible prize. I hope I continue writing stories that people want to read,” said Thakur.
“For my strange story about mothers and daughters, about bodies, beauty standards, and Bombay street food to find such a global audience is thrilling. Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said.
“I’ve spent 10 out of 26 years living in countries not my own. India, where I’m from, is simultaneously strange and familiar, accepting and rejecting. Writing stories is a way for me to accept that Mumbai is a city I will long for even when I am in it; it is a way to remake ‘place’ in my mind,” she added.
“The short story form favours the brave and the bold writer. In ‘Aishwarya Rai’, Sanjana Thakur employs brutal irony, sarcasm, cynicism and wry humour packaged in tight prose and stanza-like paragraphs to confront us with the fracturing of family and the self as a result of modern urban existence,” said Ugandan British novelist Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Chair of the judging panel.