POKHARA: Amitabha Bagchi on Monday won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019 for his novel "Half the Night is Gone".
The book beat "99 Nights in Logar" (Jamil Jan Kochai), "The Far Field" (Madhuri Vijay), "There's Gunpowder in the Air" (Manoranjan Byapari, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha), "The City and the Sea" (Raj Kamal Jha) and "The Empty Room" (Sadia Abbas) for the USD 25,000 prize.
The prize was awared at the IME Nepal Literature Festival which concluded on Monday here.
Bagchi was handed over the prize by Nepal's Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali.
This year's international jury panel was headed by Harish Trivedi and had Jeremy Tambling, Kunda Dixit, Carmen Wickramagamage and Rifat Munim as its other members.
The festival was organised at the Taalbarahi Chowk on the bamk of lake Fema in this picturesque Nepal city.