For more established writers, fiction & non-fiction categories introduced

THIS year, Manoj Kumar Sonthalia, chairman and managing director of TNIE Group, seeded the idea to combine the Debut fiction and Nonfiction categories into a single Debut category while introducing separate Fiction and Non-Fiction categories for more established writers.

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In the shortlist for Debut writers, key to Ramnath Goenka’s vision to encourage new voices and inculcate the habit of reading in the young generation, the books nominated are -- The Fertile Earth by Ruthvika Rao (Penguin), a rare take on class that’s not projected through an ideological lens; The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian by Neha Dixit (Juggernaut) on the invisibilisation of a woman from the margins, told as a deep profile; Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia by Sam Dalrymple (HarperCollins), a new perspective on the ever-present topic of Partition.