On February 27, PEN America announced that Hindi short story writer, novelist, poet, and essayist Vinod Kumar Shukla is the recipient the 2023 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. He will receive the award on March 2 at a ceremony in New York City, US.
The PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature is conferred annually on an author whose body of work is of “enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship.” Previous winners include Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Anne Carson, M NourbeSe Philip, Sandra Cisneros, Edna O’Brien, and Adonis.
Amit Chaudhuri, Roya Hakakian, and Maaza Mengiste, the panel of judges who selected Vinod Kumar Shukla for the award, said, “Shukla’s prose and poetry are marked by acute, often defamiliarising, observation. The voice that emerges is that of a deeply intelligent onlooker; a daydreamer struck occasionally by wonder.”
Apart from the 2023 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, Shukla has been awarded the Sahitya Akademi award, the Atta Galatta–Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize, and the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year award, among others. His writing is known for its “intimate evocations of rural and small-town life” while being experimental in style and genre.
Some of Shukla’s celebrated works in translation are the novels A Window Lived in the Wall and A Silent Place, and the short story collection Blue Is Like Blue.
