Amit Chaudhuri wins £10,000 James Tait Black Prize for Biography

Author, critic and Hindustani classical singer Amit Chaudhuri, who is a professor of creative writing at Ashoka University in Sonepat, Haryana, won the prestigious James Tait Black Prize for Biography on Wednesday, August 24, 2022. Chaudhuri’s book Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music (2021) was picked out of a shortlist that included Hanif Abdurraqib’s book A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance (2021), Maria Stepanova’s book In Memory of Memory: A Romance (2021) translated by Sasha Dugdale, and Frances Wilson’s book titled Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence (2021).

Chaudhuri’s award-winning book opens with Hindustani classical singer KishoriAmonkar talking about her search for bliss and her desire to share it with her listeners. This sets the tone for the rest of the book, which is an immersive literary exploration of Chaudhuri’s self-discovery in and through music. He was not particularly fond of Hindustani classical music at first. In fact, he found it terribly embarrassing. How did this change? What kind of external conditions and internal urges catalysed it? How did language, nation, home and family get entwined with his relationship to tradition and modernity? Chaudhuri delves into all these questions, and takes the reader along on journeys to Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi and Berlin.

This £10,000 biography prize, which is annually awarded by the University of Edinburgh’s School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, was announced at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, along with the£10,000 James Tait Black Prize for Fiction won by Keith Ridgway’s novel A Shock (2021).These prizes, which have been in existence since 1919, are named after James Tait Black. He was an alumnus of the University of Edinburgh and a partner in the Edinburgh publishing firm A&C Black, which is now part of the Bloomsbury Group. The prize money comes from his wife Janet’s bequest to honour her late husband’s love of books, and it is supplemented by the university. The judges for both prizes are senior staff and postgraduate students from the oldest English Literature department in the world.

We contacted Chaudhuri over email for his initial reactions to this major honour. He promptly replied, “Although it will sound like a cliché to say that the award was completely unexpected, it is true. I was honoured enough to be on such a remarkable shortlist, a testament to the judges’ quest for a true diversity of practice and imagination among writers.”

Chaudhuri is accustomed to accolades, having won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Rabindra Puraskar, among others, in the past. He insisted, however, that the James Tait Black Prize for Biography is truly special because it is “Britain’s oldest literary prize” and one that he has known of since his teenage years. He said, “How could I not have, when past fiction winners include D H Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark, and biography winners include Lytton Strachey, Doris Lessing, and John Carey? I owe something in particular to the judges for widening the category of ‘biography’ to include works combining memoir, reflection, and imagination – again, a tribute to the prize’s evidently unique catholicity of temperament.”

Finding the Ragawas published by Penguin Random House in India, Faber in the United Kingdom, and New York Review of Books in the United States of America.Chaudhuri wrote much of it during a nine-month residential fellowship at the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris. It was a period of immense creativity. During the fellowship, Chaudhuri benefited from the feedback he received from Susan Leslie Boynton, a professor of music and historical musicology, composer Zosha de Castri, and pianist John Kamfonas.

In a press release issued by the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Dr Simon Cooke, who judged the biography prize this year, called Chaudhuri’s book “a work of great depth, subtlety, and resonance, which unobtrusively changed the way we thought about music, place, and creativity.” He added, “Folding the ethos of the raga into its own form, it is a beautifully voiced, quietly subversive masterpiece in the art of listening to the world”.

In response to our query about Chaudhuri’s win, Meru Gokhale, Publisher, The Penguin Press Group, Penguin Random House India, said, “One always remembers what it feels like to first read an Amit Chaudhuri book. Bewitching and sublime, those are the benchmarks that he has set for himself. Amit’s contribution to Indian writing and culture is truly a gift, and Finding the Raga is certainly some of his finest work. This recognition is as well-deserved as can be. I am happy to reveal that his next book Sojourn is out soon too!”

Sojourn, which is Chaudhuri’s eighth novel,revolves around a visiting professor in Berlin forging friendships, navigating desire, and getting to know the city through its sights and sounds. It engages with themes such as exile, identity, and the need to find meaning.

Chintan Girish Modi is a Mumbai-based writer who tweets @chintanwriting

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