VIJAYAWADA: Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (Harper Collins) is the winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize 2018. Gidla was raised in the Dalit community of Kazipet, a small town in Telangana. She worked as a researcher in the department of applied physics at IIT-Madras, and then moved to the US when she was 26. She works as a conductor on the New York City subway system.
This year’s panel of judges, Sampurna Chattarji, Raghu Karnad and Githa Hariharan chose Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants from a shortlist of six “because of its urgency, its revelations and its understated but seamless match of form with content”.
The judges said: “It is a marvel how, with so little friction or strain, Ants absorbs readers into undramatized lives of poverty, patriarchy, and rebellion, and the encounter with subaltern Communism. But quite apart from the rarity and necessity of the subject — Dalit lives — the book is admirable for its clean skill and technical execution. With no authorial flourishes, it allows the story’s innate passion and gravitas to display themselves.”
Other books in the 2018 shortlist
We That Are Young, Preti Taneja (Penguin/Hamish Hamilton)
Temporary People, Deepak Unnikrishnan (Penguin Books)
Remnants of a Separation, Aanchal Malhotra (Harper Collins)
The Sensational Life and Death of Qandeel Baloch, Sanam Maher (Aleph)
How to Travel Light, Shreevatsa Nevatia (Penguin Books)