LAHORE: Bilal Tanweer has won the 2014 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize for his novel The Scatter Here Is Too Great.
The award is named after journalist Shakti Bhatt, who passed away in 2007. The judges for this year’s award were authors Amit Chaudhuri, Aatish Taseer and Mridula Koshy.
Tanweer is visiting faculty at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mushtaq Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences (MGSHSS) at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS).
Tanweer is an alumnus of LUMS. He graduated from the BSc (Honours) programme in 2006. He is a writer and translator. His fiction, poetry and translations have appeared in various international magazines including Granta, Vallum, Critical Muslim, and Words Without Borders.
He was one of Granta’s New Voices for 2011 and one of the eleven recipients of the 2010 PEN Translation Fund Grant. He holds an MFA in Writing (fiction) from Columbia University for which he received a Fulbright Scholarship. He was also named an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing Programme at the University of Iowa.
Tanweer’s debut novel The Scatter Here is Too Great was published in the subcontinent by Random House in December 2013. It was published in the UK (Jonathan Cape), US (Harper Collins) and France (Editions Grasset & Fasquelle) in 2014. The book opens with a bomb going off at Cantonment station in Karachi.
There are dead bodies. It is the end of the world for some, while for others, it is another day in the city.
The novel takes a sweep in time and space and the vastness of Karachi to examine a host of characters: an old communist poet, Comrade Sukhansaz, who goes missing after the bomb blast; a girl’s heart breaks for love lost; a father must confront the tangle of relationships he has avoided for many years; an ambulance driver sees two strange men roaming the streets that nobody else seems to have noticed. Among the survivors of the explosion, a writer tries to make sense of it all. He tries to gather the scatter, trying to claim everything that is broken and beautiful to him in the city.
He is also a regular contributor to The Express Tribune.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 4th, 2014.
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