On Friday, the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize announced Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya (Penguin Random House) as this year’s winner. Mukul will receive a cash award of Rs 15 lakhs, a trophy, and a citation.
The other books on the shortlist were Achyut Chetan’s Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic (Cambridge University Press), Rotem Geva’s Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India’s Capital (Stanford University Press), Gita Ramaswamy’s Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: Memoirs of a Lapsed Revolutionary (Navayana), and Taylor C Sherman’s Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths (Princeton University Press).
This year’s jury comprised political scientist Niraja GopalJayal (Chair); entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal; historian Srinath Raghavan; former diplomat Navtej Sarna; policy analyst Yamini Aiyar, and lawyer Rahul Matthan. The jury said about Mukul’s book, “...Through Agyeya’s life, the book offers a panoramic view of the landscape of Hindi literature in possibly its most fertile period, and of the exceptional writers and poets who populated it.”
Akshaya Mukul is also the author of Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015), written with the help of a New India Foundation Book Fellowship.
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