India’s Top Book Award Recognises Barbican Author

January 6, 2025

India’s National Academy of Letters, The Sahitya Akademi, has just announced its awards for India’s best books of the last five years. Its top prize, The Sahitya Akademi Award for English Fiction 2024, has been won by Easterine Kire for her novel Spirit Nights, published by Barbican Press in 2022.

On receiving news of the award, Easterine said, “I am, naturally very pleased to receive this award for Spirit Nights. I love the novel. I loved writing it and losing myself in that world. It truly warms my heart to receive this award, because it is unaccompanied by the glamour that has suddenly overtaken the world of books in India. It is an award that quietly says, you have arrived. A big thank you to Barbican from the bottom of my heart for valuing it and giving it first life!”

“I met Easterine Kire at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2020, and knew that Barbican Press had to work with her,” said publisher Martin Goodman. “Easterine’s books conjure stories from her Naga culture, that resonate with readers at a deep human level. It’s truly heartening that Spirit Nights has won this prestigious award.”

“Superstition, ancient prophecies and the spirit world are at the heart of this pertinent fable set in the author’s native Nagaland in north-east India,” wrote The Lady. “Kire’s rich and creative storytelling relay important moral messages about human behaviour within a compelling narrative.” Elsewhere, Scroll.in praised Spirit Nights for how it “succeeds in infusing life into a mythological tale of light and darkness”.

This crowns a run of awards success for Spirit Nights, which was longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature, the Times of India Author Award, and won the FICCI India Book of the Year.

Easterine will receive a plaque, a shawl and 100,000 rupees at a ceremony in Delhi on 8th March 2025.

Read more about the awards at The Hindu.

“I harvested community memory of the Naga tribes in their remote village homes to gather the tales that fuel this novel. These stories reflect their spiritual world and while some might think of the stories as fantasy or magical, for the villagers, and for me, they are our reality. From them, I have learned about trusting my own power as a woman, and how a storm of forces are at work behind the observed world of our everyday lives. In Nagaland, we live our lives in great intimacy with the spiritual world and I hope this novel helps return western readers to such a place of awe for nature.”

~ Easterine Kire on writing Spirit Nights