Zara Chowdhary Wins Shakti Bhatt Prize for Memoir on 2002 Gujarat Riots
The Wire Staff
New Delhi: Author Zara Chowdhary is the winner of the 2025 and last Shakti Bhatt Prize, for her debut memoir The Lucky Ones set in the backdrop of the Gujarat riots.
The award citation notes that the book mines generational family trauma to document three months of sectarian violence in Chowdhary's hometown of Ahmedabad.
"This brave and striking account, set among the fires of the 2002 riots, when Chowdhary was just 16, is also the story of a trapped, severely dysfunctional family caught up in the tides of Indian history," it said.
The Shakti Bhatt Prize will be discontinued after this year's award.
The award, originally called The Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, was started in 2008. In later years it became a prize that honoured a writer's body of work. It is given to writers of the subcontinent.
The following is a list of Shakti Bhatt Prize winners from 2008 to 2025.
Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, 2008
Mridula Koshy, If It Is Sweet, 2009
Samanth Subramanian, Following Fish, 2010
Jamil Ahmad, The Wandering Falcon, 2011
Naresh Fernandes, Taj Mahal Foxtrot, 2012
Nilanjana Roy, The Wildings, 2013
Bilal Tanweer, The Scatter Here is Too Great, 2014
Rohini Mohan, The Seasons of Trouble, 2015
Akshaya Mukul, Gita Press and the Making of India, 2016
Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage, 2017
Sujatha Gidla, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, 2018
Tony Joseph, Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From, 2019
Anand Teltumbde & Gautam Navlakha, Body of Work, 2020
The Shakti Bhatt Foundation did not award a literary prize in 2021, and instead made a donation towards Covid relief work
Manoranjan Byapari, Body of Work, 2022
CS Lakshmi (Ambai), Body of Work, 2023
Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, Body of Work, 2024
Zara Chowdhary, The Lucky Ones, 2025
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