Fire Bird by Perumal Murugan, translated from the Tamil by Janani Kannan, was announced as the winner of the 2023 JCB Prize for Literature. In an event held at the Taj Mahal, New Delhi on November 18th, the prestigious literary award was awarded to Sundaram Kannan and Manasi Subramaniam, the Tamil publisher and the editor of the English translation, respectively, on behalf of the author and the translator.

Fire Bird, a transcendental novel, sees the author draw from his own life experiences of displacement and movement and explores the fragility of our fundamental attraction to permanence and our futile efforts to attain it. In keeping with the author’s previous work, it distills many of his ruminations on the incorrigible nature of the personal, and the inevitable strife of life. This is, notably, Perumal Murugan’s twelfth novel. He’s an astoundingly prolific author, having written six collections of short stories, six anthologies of poetry and many non-fiction books in addition to his novels. The translator, Janani Kannan, is a US-based architect, translator, singer and marathon runner, who translated Rising Heat, Perumal Murugan’s very first novel.

The event was graced by distinguished members of the literary and cultural community of the city, consisting, among other things, of a Dastangoi performance by Fouzia Dastango, conceptualised from R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days by Dr. Bakul Dev, and written by Vineeta Dixit and Sayeed Alam. Jury Chair Srinath Perur expressed being moved by the “astonishing particularity” of the work, while literary director Mita Kapur found the winning novel to be an epitome of the spirit of the Prize, whose ethos and literary quest “encompasses the gamut of our country”. The JCB Prize for Literature was set up in 2018 to enhance the prestige of literary achievement in India and create greater visibility for contemporary Indian writing. Fire Bird is the fifth book in the Prize’s six-year history to have been translated from other Indian languages to English, the only winner in the original English being the author Madhuri Vijay, who won the Prize in 2019 for The Far Field, her first novel.

Perumal Morgan’s books are alive with the frisson of life and circumstance; consider the following stately six for your reading pleasure:

Rising Heat