SOURCE: THE INDIAN EXPRESS
The Paradise of Food (Juggernaut) by Khalid Jawed, translated from Urdu by Baran Farooqi has won the Rs 25 lakh JCB Prize for Literature. This year’s shortlist of five novels consisted entirely of translated works. While translated works from Bengali and Malayalam have featured on previous JCB shortlists, this is the first time in the five-year-old award’s history that English translations of Hindi, Urdu and Nepali novels made it to the shortlist.
At the award ceremony held in Oberoi Hotel in the capital, Jawed said, “I’m experiencing a real moment of joy today. I didn’t expect this at all. I wrote this novel in 2014 in Urdu, and today its star has shone. Because of my translator, it has been transported into another language and world. Now it has gotten international recognition.” Farooqi said, “It is compelling for me to talk of my father, Mehr Afshan Farooqi, who introduced me to Urdu. I recently discovered Salman Rushdie used a Ghalib quote in one of his own books translated by my father. It goes: ‘If there is a knower of tongues here, fetch him/There’s a stranger in the city/ and he has many things to say.’ Urdu is not spoken as much in our country today, and someone needed to speak for this Urdu.”