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…