The JCB Prize for Literature has shut down. What else has ended with it?

One full month after the announcement of the 2025 International Booker Prize winner, it is difficult to enter a London bookshop without seeing the winning book, Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq’s short story collection Heart Lamp, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, displayed in full glory. From the Foyle’s shop window in Charing Cross to special tables in Waterstones and Hatchard’s, not to mention dozens of independent bookshops, Heart Lamp is, quite literally, everywhere.

While sales figures in the UK are yet to be disclosed publicly, publishers And Other Stories, whose decision to publish the book in the UK made it eligible for the prize, have been working hard to meet the demand from online and in-store buyers. In India, sales are believed to be closing in on the 100,000-mark, an incredible achievement by any standards for a work of serious contemporary fiction, and a translation, and a volume of short stories, at that.

These figures are in the same orbit as the sales of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, the English translation of Ret Samadhi by Daisy Rockwell, which won the International Booker Prize in 2022, and of the Hindi original. Clearly, when an Indian book wins the International Booker Prize for its English translation, readers – some regular, many more sporadic – in the country snap up copies. Earlier, we saw the same success for Indian or India-linked winners of the Booker Prize – Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, and Aravind Adiga – for their books.

The end of the story

This is exactly what the JCB Prize for Literature had wanted, hoped and expected to achieve with its winning titles in India. Launched in 2018, the prize picked seven winners in seven successive years, awarding the writer Rs 25 lakh, and the translator, when there was one, Rs 10 lakh, before quietly disappearing.

The prize that had positioned itself as the Indian Booker, and had definitive plans to make the same impact on the world of books in India, had the unlikeliest of endings – at least, in the form in which it had begun life – by simply ghosting the entire literary world. No announcement, no farewell, no summing up.

Of course, the modest ceremony for the 2024 award, held not at a swank venue but at the sponsor’s corporate headquarters in Faridabad, Haryana, held a clue. So did the near-total lack of marketing for the shortlisted books. Everyone in the literary establishment, especially in Delhi, had an inkling that this might be a swansong. There is still no formal acknowledgement, but with no announcements having been made for the 2025 awards, it is obviously the end of the prize as we knew it.

The only official document in this context is a document that has been uploaded to the website of the JCB Prize for Literature, stating, among other things, that the “Notice is hereby given that in pursuance of sub-section (4)(ii) of section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013, an application has been made by JCB Literature Foundation to the Registrar of companies, Delhi & Haryana at Delhi for revocation of the licence issued to it under section 8(5) of the companies Act, 2013. After the cancellation of license, the company will be required to add the word “Private Limited” to its name in place of “Foundation”.

The same document, however, lists activities that are more or less the same as those involved in running the prize.

The same mills that churned with the rumours of closure have also been suggesting that the JCB Prize might be back, in a different form. The organisers have commissioned a survey to assess the impact of the prize over seven years, and many people in the world of books have been interviewed for it. But whether the findings will form the basis of a newer version of the prize, or will feed into a closure report, is a closely guarded secret at the moment.

Why, then, did the JCB Prize fold? Why, for that matter, did its big-ticket predecessor, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature go the same way after its 2019 awards, the ninth in the series that gave $25,000 to the winning title (shared equally between the writer and translator in case of a translated book). The onset of the pandemic may have forced the hands of the sponsors, although there, too, no formal announcement was made.

Still, the JCB Prize for Literature came on the scene with a grand flourish and with seemingly powerful intent, as exemplified by the extravagant marketing, advertising, and event-management that went into the first two years of the prize with Rana Dasgupta as the director. Dasgupta, for reasons never made clear to the literary community, was let go of immediately after the second year of the prize, and a few months later, Mita Kapur, founder of the literary agency Siyahi, took over, leading the prize over the next five years, including the difficult ones during the pandemic.

To its credit, despite having to go online for everything, the prize did not falter in its commitment during this period, returning to something like the grandeur of its pre-pandemic version from 2022 onwards.

What changed, then, forcing the decision to close down? Maybe it is important to accept and acknowledge here that the corporate entity behind the prize, JCB, has had its own inadvertent image problem in India with its bulldozers being pressed into service for demolition of private property as a means of punitive administrative steps undertaken by several state governments. This even led to an open letter criticising the prize, signed by over 120 writers, translators, and publishers in 2024. But the company, of course, has not gone public with its reasons for stopping – or, at the very least, pausing – the prize.

Did the prize make an impact?

Perhaps the more important question, however, is what sort of JCB-Prize-shaped hole there will be in India’s literary world now. To make even informed guesses, it is, of course, necessary to consider the achievements of the prize over its seven years. And the very first question here is, are seven years long enough for a literary prize to have made significant effect?

The JCB Prize for Literature was by no means the first high-profile literary prize in India. The Crossword Book Award was instituted by the bookshop chain back in 1998 and continues to be run despite a brief break. The Hindu Literary Prize began life in 2010, continuing the till the outbreak of the pandemic in 2019. The Sahitya Akademi awards were established as far back as in 1954, and continue to be given out. And there was, of course, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

Stepping as it did into a space already primed for literary awards, the JCB Prize had the luxury of being able to hit the ground running. Given this backdrop, seven years was long enough to build on an impactful beginning. For comparison, remember that Tomb of Sand won the International Booker in its seventh year.

The greatest opportunity for the prize was to create interest – and, by extension, a return to a reading culture – in not just the winning book but the entire list of shortlisted and even longlisted titles. Over seven years, these numbered 71 (in 2019, two of Perumal Murugan’s novels were considered as a combined work) and 35, respectively, amounting to a fine showcase of fiction from India. And yet, despite efforts ranging from special films, appearances at literary festivals, and bookshop partnerships, none of the novels could be said to have gained a boost because of their appearance on the longlist or shortlist.

Why, even the winning books have not reported anything remotely close to the kind of sales that India’s two International Booker Prize winners did. Consider the seven fine novels that have won the JCB Prize between 2018 and 2024.

• 2018: Jasmine Days, Benyamin, translated from the Malayalam by Shahnaz Habib.
• 2019: The Far Field, Madhuri Vijay.
• 2020: Moustache, S Hareesh, translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil.
• 2021: Delhi, A Soliloquy, M Mukundan, translated from the Malayalam by Fathima EV and Nandakumar K.
• 2022: The Paradise of Food, Khalid Jawed, translated from the Urdu by Baran Farooqi.
• 2023: Fire Bird, Perumal Murugan, translated from the Tamil by Janaki Kannan.
• 2024: Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life, Upamanyu Chatterjee.

While official sales figures are not available, the informal response from publishers was that none of these books became break-out successes among book-buyers.

Arguably the most important actual achievement of the prize, therefore, was to create expectations of winning, among writers and publishers. For the first time, both of these groups thought actively about the possibility of winning the prize when they put out a title. Perhaps the great change in publishing programmes came because of the decision of the prize to consider translated books as well as those written in English. As many as 19 of the 36 shortlisted titles over seven years have been translations from various Indian languages.

While it might be an exaggeration to state that publishers looked at translations with greater intent because of the chances of one of them winning the prize, there was undoubtedly a renewed focus on translated because of the prize.

The impact of the end of the prize, then, will be felt mostly by the publishing community. Most of all, probably, by the writers and translators who will not win the Rs 25-lakh and Rs 10-lakh purses. With serious writing being a monetarily dismal practice in India, awards like these can go a long way towards supporting future work by prize-winning authors.

For readers, unfortunately, the closure of the prize may have very little impact. Still, the JCB Prize for Literature has create a model. The literary community will certainly be hoping for a second version of the prize – or a new one to replace it.

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