The Undergraduate Writing Programme (UWP) held the prize distribution ceremony for the third edition of their annual non-fiction essay competition 'First Word' on 24th September, outside the Black Box Theatre. First Word “spotlights insightful, dynamic, and provocative non-fiction writing” from rising Ashokan sophomores. This year, the prompts for the essay were: Blood, Loiter, Appetite, and Icon. Ananya Makker (UG’27) and Nandana Nair (UG’27) were declared winners.
In interviews with The Edict, both writers spoke about the difficulty of the writing process. For Ananya, their “appetite” for dance consumed them and constant encouragement from their friends, Vidushi and Pizo, pushed them to write an emotionally difficult piece. Nandana, on the other hand, told us about the “benevolence” of perceiving violence as a child, intergenerational trauma and holding space for both forgiveness and accountability. Both winning writers praised other entries. On the day of the event, excerpts from winning and shortlisted essays were pasted on the walls for students to appreciate and discuss.
Professor Krittika Bhattacharjee, Head of the UWP and Assistant Professor of Academic Writing, began the event with an introduction about the UWP and reflections on teaching, learning, and the craft of writing. The external jury consisted of Elizabeth Kuruvilla, Associate Publisher at Penguin Random House and previously a journalist and Parvati Sharma, author of the acclaimed book The Dead Camel and Other Stories of Love and historian. Aditya Vikram Shrivastava, an Introduction to Critical Thinking (ICT) instructor, bilingual poet and writer moderated the event.
The discussion began with a question on essay writing as a form by Shrivastava. Kuruvilla offered an editorial perspective; mentioning her experience with factual journalistic pieces and the relative novelty of creative nonfiction reading in her life. Sharma spoke of how the essay form had made the ‘self’ of the writer visible to an audience, inciting laughter from the crowd while talking of people being ‘main characters’ in their own ‘reels’. The visibility and engagement of this ‘self’ with a larger audience make the personal more social and by extension, more political. They discussed how the work of young writers (which revolved around the personal) was often perceived as ‘self-obsessed’. Speaking about the self may not necessarily be self-indulgent and Shrivastava seemed to affirm this thought, stating that ultimately, if the writing was great, “It did not really matter".
Shrivastava mentioned Sharma’s recent article, Identity of a Writer and its incisive look at the female representation of the 2024 Booker Prize nominee list. The pitfalls of not carefully assessing representation were made clear when Sharma told the audience that all the women nominated were white and the singular male nominee was a black man. White women had been well represented since the award’s inception whereas the first black woman to be nominated (Bernardine Evaristo, for the novel Girl, Woman, Other in 2019) had to share her award with Margaret Atwood (who had been shortlisted for the sixth time), Sharma stated. She brought this question of representation closer to home, and this very contest, admitting that despite the all-female nominee list for First Word, a judge from an ‘elite’ college reading essays from students belonging to an ‘elite’ university, was not a significant disruption of the norm.
Kuruvilla spoke about representation in the publishing landscape and realised that she was not publishing many female authors. She mentioned that she had not made a conscious effort to exclude women and wondered why she did not naturally get enough submissions from female authors. Consciously deciding to publish female authors, authors from the North East and marginalised castes was perhaps the only way to give genuine representation– by going against the status quo and not being ‘neutral’ to existing inequality.
The discussion came to an end with a cheeky question about the judges’ college experience at St. Stephen’s College. Kuruvilla stated that Sharma had been brilliant from the start whereas she did not attend class as much, drawing laughs from the crowd. Sharma spoke of the abundance of free time they had in college, the terrible poetry she had written as a teenager, and the necessity of boredom to write and create. Shrivastava echoed this sentiment, stating that most students from Ashoka worked like corporate employees, and the audience nodded in agreement.
After the discussion ended, judges, professors, and students congregated in conversation. A sense of community pulsated throughout the room, with comments about the essays, discussions on literature and writing, bringing together readers and writers on campus, irrespective of their majors and inclinations.
In an interview with The Edict, Sharma and Kuruvila talked of how their criteria for evaluating the essays was the ‘impulse’, the feeling they were left with after reading each submission. Reminiscing on their time studying English together at St. Stephen’s College while shifting through submissions over lunch, both went into the process without a critical eye but as readers. “Each essay walked the line between personal and political,” said Kuruvila, “while still serving as a reflection of the other.” Imparting advice to aspiring writers, Sharma’s words of wisdom were to not give up and commit oneself to the process. As a publisher, Kuruvila was in complete agreement, adding that a vital part of the profession is to keep writing, write sincerely, and not worry about being published.
The Edict has published the winning entries from First Word. You can read Ananya Makker's essay, I Swallow it Whole here and Nandana Nair's essay, Benevolence here.
(Edited by Srijana Siri)
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