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  • Post last modified:December 4, 2017
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Sadhguru, Ambi Parameswaran, Devdutt Pattanaik and Ruchir Sharma raise the bar at the Raymond Crossword Award 2017.


The Raymond Crossword Book Award, India’s first and most prestigious Book Award, recognizes and rewards the best of Indian writing & Indian authors. 

Over the years, the awards have been equated to the Pulitzer and Booker, and are a definitive, veritable platform for Indian Authors. Awards are given in the following categories.

Jury Category
Best fiction, non-fiction, children’s books and translations

Popular category
Best fiction, non-fiction, Business & Management, Health & Fiction, children’s Writing

The shortlist for the popular category goes up for voting and has just been released.

Sadhguru has been nominated in the non-fiction category for Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide To Joy. His book will compete with Devlok With Devdutt Pattanaik in the same category.

Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles: India Through 50 Years of Advertising by Ambi Parmeshwaran and The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma will compete in the  Business & Management category.

Indian authors with great following such as Ashwin Sanghi, Ravinder Singh, Durjoy Dutta, Sudha Murthy, Radhakrishnan Pillai, Chetan Bhagat also feature prominently in the shortlist.

This year, Virat Kohli’s  biography, ‘Driven’ written by Vijay Lokapally is among the contenders. In the biography category, it will compete with Khullam Khulla: Rishi Kapoor Uncensored co-authored with Meena Iyer, An Unsuitable Boy by Karan Johar, Challenging Destiny, Chhatrapati Shivaji’s biography by Medha Bhaskaran and Rekha-The Untold Story, Rekha’s biography by Yasser Usman.

In 2016, for the first time, the award also introduced the Lifetime Achievement Award, which was conferred upon Ruskin Bond by the legend Gulzar.

These 10 categories make for a very engaging evening at the Award, which is usually ‘houseful’, considering that it is the only venerated award in the literary space in India.

The awardees, sometimes discovered by the Award itself, have invariably risen to stature in the world of literature; making the Crossword Book Award a definitive barometer for excellence in Indian writing in English.

Maulik Desai, head of Crossword Bookstores says, “When Crossword was founded 25 years ago, the thought was very simple – to cultivate and spread the joy of reading! Back to 2017, it is not just reading but a lot of inspired writing that has us celebrating. The Raymond Crossword Book Award is a dense testament to that. For the 15th year running, we are celebrating Indian literature and its upswing. The way the literary engine is motoring most would agree when I say that it is just the dawn of an era!”

Blog by Vidhya Thakkar

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