New Delhi, Oct 6: Eminent Khasi writer Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, known for writing on local folktales and legends, has won the coveted Shakti Bhatt award.
The writer feels “humbled” at the recognition presented to him for exceptional contributions to Indian literature.
“I am humbled and elated,” Kynpham told The Shillong Times after winning the award.
An award-winning author, Kynpham is the co-editor of Late-Blooming Cherries: Haiku Poetry from India and Dancing Earth: An Anthology of Poetry from Northeast India. He has also published poetry on platforms like Wasafiri and PEN International, and has been anthologised by The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry and The Penguin Book of Indian Poets.
The writer teaches at the North-Eastern Hill University. He has authored the novel Funeral Nights (2021) as “the wettest desert on earth” and his latest novel The Distaste of the Earth was recently long-listed for the prestigious JCB Prize for Literature 2024.
The prize, started in 2008, in memory of the late editor and writer Shakti Bhatt, is awarded for a writer’s body of work without being limited to “facile parochialism”, in the words of poet Arundhathi Subramaniam in a Poetry International essay.
She adds, “He regards Khasi as the language of his tribe and English as the language that enables him to reject isolationism”.
The story of Manik Raitong, the wretched queen and Lieng Makaw has found its way into multiple works by Nongkynrih, particularly Around the Hearth, a treatise on folktales of the region.
It goes that Manik, an orphan outcast from society, falls in love with a princess but is rejected by her family due to the nature of his birth.
Heartbroken, he banishes himself to the outskirts yet again and walks around with a flute, his lone companion, until the now-queen rediscovers him many years later. Around the Hearth traces the lineage of stories – about gods, nature and humanity – that have animated the Khasi tribe long before Thomas Jones, a Christian missionary, brought in the Roman script in 1842 and began forming the Khasi script.
Kynpham wins a cash award of Rs 2 lakh. The prize is privately-funded, independent, and administered by a group of writers.
