22. Nov 2017

Easterine Kire wins Book of the Year prize of prestigious TataLiterature Live Awards

Shortlisted alongside Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Nagaland author and former ICORN writer in Tromsø, Easterine Kire, was declared Book of the Year winner for fiction at the TataLiterature Live Awards in Mumbai with her book Son of the Thundercloud.

The award was announced Sunday evening 19 November, at the Tata Literature Live event in Mumbai, where publishers and writers from over 100 countries participated.

Easterine Kire feels proud and happy to receive the prize, and says:

I am so pleased to win this award. I feel very grateful and see that it will help bring the book to many more readers both in India and outside India. It's what any writer would want. The book according to my publisher shows that life and love are eternal. It combines scriptural events with that of Naga folklore and tries to show what is of the greatest worth in life: Love in its many forms.

Kire was the first ICORN writer welcomed in the city of Tromsø in the north of Norway, arriving already in 2005. Stine Fjeldsøe, coordinator of the ICORN programme in Tromsø, says:

It is with immense joy and pride that we congratulate Easterine Kire with the Tata Book of the Year Award in India. This is a great achievement for Easterine and her authorship. But it is also a significant accomplishment for Tromsø City of Refuge. Easterine was the first writer invited to Tromsø through the ICORN programme, and when she arrived in the city in 2005, she quickly became a Tromsø-friend. This resulted in the book Ah… People of Tromsø, poems written to the people of the city.

For Tromsø, as a city of refuge, this award is a symbol of the work that is being done here for writers and artists at risk to be able to continue to work and express themselves freely. This is an enormous motivation to continue our work.

Easterine Kire will be present at the celebration of her award by Tromsø City Library and City Archives on 28 November, 6:00-7.00 pm.

About

Easterine Kire has authored more than 27 books and is a recipient of the Nagaland Governor’s Award for excellence in literature in 2011, and the Catalan PEN International Free Voice Award. Her novel A Terrible Matriarchy, which talks about a young girl growing up in a traditional Naga society, was selected by the Government of India to be translated into six UNESCO languages. Kire’s novel Bitter Wormwood got nominated for The Hindu Lit Prize in 2013, and in 2016, she was awarded The Hindu Prize for Best Fiction 2015 for her novel When the River Sleeps.

Kire is a former ICORN writer-in-residence in Tromsø, since 2005. She returned to her home country Nagaland in 2015, and currently lives and works both in Nagaland and in Norway.