Indian writers in fiction prize list

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, MARCH 22. Three Indian women writers - Ms. Anita Desai, Ms. Shauna Singh Baldwin and Ms. Sunetra Gupta - figure in the Orange Fiction Prize longlist announced at the London International Book Fair which ended here today.

All three live outside India and their novels share the theme of this year's entries: clash of cultures in the age of globalisation.

For the final nod, which comes in June, they would be competing with the formidable Ms. A. L. Kennedy on the one hand and a comparatively newcomer Ms. Zadie Smith on the other. She created ripples when she got a 250,000-Pound advance for her first two novels.

The 30,000-Pound ``women-only'' Orange Prize, sponsored by a phone company, is Britain's biggest literary lottery - bigger than the much talked about Booker - and has been criticised for its sexist bias even by several women writers, though nobody has turned it down for that reason.

Clearly, the prize money and the things it does to a winner - publicity, bigger sales, celebrity status - have a greater pull than qualms about gender discrimination which in this case works for women.

Ms. Anita Desai made it to the list for Fasting, Feasting which missed the Booker Prize last year by a whisker; Ms. Shauna Singh Baldwin for her overrated What The Body Remembers; and Ms. Sunetra Gupta for the underrated A Sin Of Colour.

Ms. Polly Toynbee, who chaired the panel of judges, said nine of the 20 books on the longlist were about ``clashes of culture which couldn't be much more relevant this time with mass migration in all parts of the globe and asylum- seeking in the news''.

In a survey, lots of men had lots of nasty things to say about women writers, but let that pass for now.

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Section  : Features
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