Zara Chowdhary wins 2025 Shakti Bhatt award for debut memoir

The Hindu

a day ago

Zara Chowdhary has won the 2025 Shakti Bhatt award for her debut memoir The Lucky Ones.
Ms. Chowdhary is a writer, producer, and educator from Chennai, India. She spent her first decade as an adult working in film, advertising and media production.
The book mines generational family trauma to document three months of sectarian violence in Ms. Chowdhary's hometown Ahmedabad during the 2002 Gujarat riots. Her account, when she was just 16, is also the story of a trapped, severely dysfunctional family caught up in the tides of Indian history.
Prize to be discontinued
Meanwhile, the Shakti Bhatt Foundation said the Prize would be discontinued after this year's award.
'We are pleased to end the prize the way it began, in 2008, by awarding a debut author,' an official statement issued by the foundation said.
Originally called The Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, in later years it became a prize that honoured a writer's body of work. For 17 years, the prize recognised and celebrated literature from the South Asian subcontinent, awarding writers from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and every corner of India, it said.
'The Shakti Bhatt Foundation which set up the prize would not have succeeded without the financial backing of senior journalist, author and Padma Bhushan recipient TJS George, and contributions from journalist Sheela Bhatt and Hitachi America Professor of Engineering emeritus at Stanford University and Padma Bhushan awardee, Professor Thomas Kailath and author Arshia Sattar,' the statement added.
Some of the earlier awardees include Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes, 2008), Mridula Koshy (If It Is Sweet, 2009), Akshaya Mukul (Gita Press and the Making of India, 2016), Tony Joseph (Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From, 2019) and Anand Teltumbde and Gautam Navlakha (Body of Work, 2020).