Kohima, Oct. 27 (EMN): Easterine Kire’s book, Son of the Thundercloud, has been nominated for the Book of the Year Award in the Fiction category at the Tata Literature Live Awards 2017. The award will be announced in November in Mumbai.
The Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year Award has been constituted to recognise noteworthy work in the Indian literary space across the fiction and non-fiction genres. Besides Son of a Thundercloud, the other longlisted nominees for the Fiction category are: Harilal and Sons by Sujit Saraf; Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy; Scattered Souls by Shahnaz Bashir; The Small Town Sea by Anees Salim; and When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy.In 2016, Easterine Kire had won The Hindu Prize for Best Fiction 2015 for her novel ‘When the River Sleeps’. Her novel ‘Bitter Wormwood’ also got nominated for the The Hindu Lit Prize in 2013.
Easterine has etched her niche in literature in Nagaland as early as the 1980s. With her book ‘Kelhoukevira’ (1983), she became the first individual Naga poet to have a volume of poetry published, and her first novel ‘A Naga Village Remembered’ (2003) was the first Naga novel to be written/published in English by a Naga writer. She 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. She has authored more than 27 books.