Indian writer Annie Zaidi was on Wednesday announced as the 2019 winner of the USD 100,000 Nine Dots Prize, a prestigious book prize created to award innovative thinking that addresses contemporary issues around the world.
Mumbai-based Zaidi, a freelance writer whose work includes reportage, essays, short stories, poetry and plays, won for her entry Bread, Cement, Cactus, combining memoir and reportage to explore concepts of home and belonging rooted in her experience of contemporary life in India.
What really appealed to me about the Nine Dots Prize was the way it encourages entrants to think without borders or restraints. I had been working towards a similarly themed project for a while but didn’t have the financial, or even mental, bandwidth to do it justice. The Prize will allow me to dedicate time to the examination of this question, which is of critical importance in the modern world and it will help fund the necessary research trips, which, as a freelancer, is something I appreciate hugely.Annie Zaidi, Writer and Winner of Nine Dots Prize
Annie Zaidi, 40, works on fiction, scripts and columns for magazines and newspapers. She has published both fiction and non-fiction, including a collection of essays ‘’ Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales’’, which was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award in 2010, and “Love Stories # 1 to 14” a collection of short fiction published in 2012.
In Annie Zaidi we have found a powerful and compelling voice with a unique insight into what home means for citizens of the world today. We are very excited to see how Annie’s work will develop over the coming year and hope that it will help further current conversations around the concept of belonging worldwide. The anonymous judging process is crucial to the Nine Dots Prize’s mission to discover new ways of tackling contemporary issues, whether they come from established thinkers or new voices. The fact that our second winner is so different from our first is testament to the success of this method,Professor Simon Goldhill, Professor in Greek Literature and Culture and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge University, and Chair of the Nine Dots Prize Board.
The inaugural Nine Dots Prize posed the question “ Are digital technologies making politics impossible?’’ was won by former Google employee turned Oxford philosopher James Williams. The Nine Dots Prize is judged anonymously and funded by the Kadas Prize Foundation, a UK-registered charity . The Prize name references a lateral thinking puzzle that can only be solved by drawing outside of a box of nine dots arranged in three rows of three.
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