The Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Fiction Prize (English)
The Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Non-Fiction Prize (English)
The Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Literary Achievement Award in Kannada
What is it?
For the first time, the Bangalore Literature Festival presents Literary Awards in conjunction with Atta Galatta, the city-based bookstore and art-literature space brought to life by Subodh Sankar and Lakshmi Subodh. Atta Galatta is also the Official Festival Bookstore.
The awards carry a total purse of Rs 2 lakhs for:
Best Fiction (English), Best Non-Fiction (English) and a Literary Achievement Award in Kannada.
The Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Fiction Prize (English)
Shortlist
Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh – Penguin
The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer – Picador
The Year of The Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota – Picador
Sleeping on Jupiter by Anuradha Roy – Hachette
Firebird by Saikat Majumdar – Hachette
The Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Non-Fiction Prize (English)
Shortlist
Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India by Akshaya Mukul – HarperCollins India
The Heat and Dust Project by Devapriya Roy and Saurav Jha – HarperCollins India
My Name is Abu Salem by S Hussain Zaidi – Penguin
The Emergency: A Personal History by Coomi Kapoor – Penguin
Halt Station India by Rajendra Aklekar – Rupa
Editor Unplugged by Vinod Mehta – Penguin
The Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Literary Achievement Award in Kannada
For the Kannada award, our jury will choose 1 winning author who has made a significant contribution to Kannada language and literature in form, function and flavour.
The Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize trophy:
It is an original sculpture titled “Thought Beyond Words” – to showcase how creative insights precede their translation into language.
The sculpture depicts the mind as a tree and thoughts as birds. Birds come and go to the branches of the tree. Some fleetingly, some with more persistence. Some birds will take up residence in the tree, build a nest in its branches, giving birth to more thoughts.
Jury:
A subterranean widespread jury headed by Usha KR, Vivek Shanbhag and Harish Bijoor.
Usha K. R.

Bio
Usha K R has been writing fiction in English for over three decades now. She began by writing short stories, which were published in various Indian magazines and newspapers. Her short story, Sepia Tones won the Katha Award for Creative Writing in English. Usha K R is the author of the novels ‘Monkey-man’ (2010/ Penguin India), ‘A Girl and a River’ (2007/Penguin India), ‘The Chosen’ (2003/Penguin India) and ‘Sojourn’ (1998/EastWest Books). Her novels have been listed for several awards including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Crossword Award, the Man Asia and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. ‘A Girl and a River’ won the Vodafone Crossword Award, 2007. ‘Monkey-man’ was short listed for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2012.
Vivek Shanbhag

Bio
Vivek Shanbhag writes in Kannada. He has published five short story collections, three novels and two plays, and has edited two anthologies, one of them in English. For 7 years from 2005 to 2012, he published and edited the literary journal Desha Kaala. His acclaimed novel Ghachar Ghochar was published in English translation in 2015. He was a Fall 2016 resident at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. An engineer by training, he lives in Bangalore.
Harish Bijoor

Bio
- Harish Bijoor is a Brand-thinker and practitioner operating out of Bengaluru, India. He runs a unique boutique-consulting outfit branded “Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.”, a brand name that has a consulting presence across the markets of Hong Kong, Seattle, London, Istanbul, Dubai and the Indian sub-continent.
- Harish has spent his career across the aggressive realms of FMCG, Telecom and Consumer Durables. He is considered a marketing practitioner and thinker who is ahead of the consumer thinking curve, year on year.
- Harish is a public speaker who speaks to corporate audiences across the globe in the realm of motivation, people-management issues, brands, marketing and business at large. He has spoken to corporate audiences across the world for 15, 812 hours to date.
- Harish teaches at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad & Mohali, in addition to semesters at overseas Business schools in the US and Europe. He has been teaching at the Indian School of Business for the past 20 years.
- Harish has recently published a book titled, “Marketing Trends – Smart Insights into the world of Indian Business”, a serious book written in a style that is distinctly young and ‘MTV-ish’!
- He is currently involved in his second book on core branding. The book is titled, ”Brand Irrationals: a fundamental journey into brand-think”
- Harish has simultaneously been commissioned to write a book on “Customer Service mechanisms” at play in contemporary marketing contexts.
- Harish is actively involved in research relating to Rural Consumer Behavior, Rural Retail Networks and Trade mechanisms at play. The current research exercise he is involved in spans a 6-year period covering 84,850 consumers across India.
- Harish has published papers extensively on the subjects relating to Strategic Marketing, Branding, Consumer Behavior, Retail networks, Rural marketing, Marketing research and Trend-analysis.
- Harish Bijoor contributes regularly to Business publications on Branding, sales, distribution and related topics.
- Currently, Harish works on the bleeding-edge brand & marketing work related to the Metaverse and Web 3.0
Find out more about Harish Bijoor at:
Http://ww.harishbijoorconsults.com
You can follow him on Twitter.com @harishbijoor
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