The laurels for Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness keep pouring in.
Roy’s book – which was, in 2017, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize – is one among five nominees in the category of fiction awarded by the prestigious National Book Critics Circle. Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (like Roy, also published by Penguin Random House) has also made the list of five nominees. Hamid’s book, incidentally, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is Roy’s second book in 20 years. Her first was The God of Small Things published in 1997 which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
Both books, which were published to critical acclaim in 2017, are competing against Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour, Joan Silber’s Improvement and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing for the coveted prize in the Fiction category.
The critics circle chose five nominees in each of six competitive categories: fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, biography, poetry and criticism.
The National Book Critics Circle Awards, begun in 1975, are the sole prizes bestowed by a jury of over 1,000 working critics and book-review editors. The awards will be presented on 15 March 2018 at the New School in New York City.
(With inputs from AP)
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