Indian writer Indra Das has won the Best Novella category at the 2024 British Fantasy Award for his book, The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar. It has been published in the UK by Subterranean Press.
The British Fantasy Awards are the longest-running fantasy awards in the UK. The awards are presented in 16 categories across different mediums and for a variety of creators in the genre.
In The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar, Ru is a boy from nowhere. Though he lives somewhere – the city of Calcutta – his classmates in school remind him he doesn’t look like them, and must come from somewhere else. When Ru asks his parents, they tell him they are descended from nomads. But even nomads must come from somewhere. The question, forever on the mind of the boy from nowhere, is where.
Alone in a city that’s home but doesn’t feel like it, Ru befriends Alice, his neighbour from the nearby Chinatown. As they grow in their friendship, Ru finds that Calcutta may yet be a home for him. But with his best friend starting to realise that Ru’s house and family hide a myriad of secrets, the question haunts him still – where is his family from? Are they truly from nowhere, migrants to this reality? And if so, what strange wings brought them across the vast reaches of impossibility to here – and what is their purpose?
Earlier this year, Indra Das also won the Best Novella award at The Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards for the same book.
