It was a cross-section of people united by a single passion: writing. Three authors from different walks of life made it to the list of top three award winners of the Sunday Herald Short Story 2015, the award presentation ceremony for which was held here on Friday.
The trophies to the winners were given away by Deccan Herald Editor K N Tilak Kumar. This is the eighth year that Deccan Herald is hosting the story writing contest and there were over 350 competing entries for the contest.
The winner of the contest was Dinesh Devarajan, a manager at Cognizant Technology Solutions, for his story ‘Dead Heat’. Aditi Pant, a teacher at Indus International School and a postgraduate in English literature from the University of Delaware, USA, won the second prize for her story ‘Written in Sand’. The third prize was given to Nandakishore K N, an engineer who has two decades of work experience in the IT industry and who is currently a research scholar at IIIT-Bengaluru, for his story ‘Life of PSY’.
All three of them have been passionate about writing for as long as they can remember and have contributed to their school and college magazines. Encouraged by the Short Story Contest awards, the award winners are now motivated to think about bringing out their own books some day. In fact, the second prize winner, Aditi Pant, already has a collection of eight stories to begin with. On the other hand, Dinesh Devarajan, a blogger at ddspace.blogspot.in, hopes to write a novel. Nandakishore K N had till now not thought about it, but would now like to keep his option open. “If there is a bathroom singer, you could call me a drawing room writer,” he said, describing himself.
What makes their achievement outstanding is that they have managed to squeeze in time to write amidst their busy schedule. Pant has two children to care of apart from the job at the school. She writes as and when she finds time for it. Devarajan too feels that time is a constraint to pursue his passion but is determined to make it work for him with what ever little time is available. The contest was adjudged by Keerti Ramachandra, freelance editor and translator whose translation of a Marathi Novel ‘A Dirge for the Dammed’ was shortlisted for the Crossword award this year, Veena Seshadri, an editor who herself has won several awards for short stories and Deepthi Talwar, the Managing Editor with Westland Ltd.