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Rushdie skips Commonwealth awards function

India hosts the Commonwealth Writers Prize award this week, the biggest literary event to be staged in the country with authors such as Salman Rushdie and J M Coetzee vying for the honour.

Organising committee chairman Pawan Kumar Varma, a foreign ministry official and prolific author in his own right, told AFP that such an event was unprecedented.

"Nothing like this has happened in India," he said. "There will be a series of readings, discussions and forums leading up to the main event on Friday," when Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh will present the awards.

Varma said the ceremony would not be overshadowed by prominent absences. "Rushdie and Coetzee cannot come. What I have been given to understand is that it is not uncommon for some shortlisted authors not to attend prize ceremonies as writers with a certain degree of eminence are committed ahead."

Varma said it was "extremely fitting" that the awards were being held in New Delhi, since "India has seen a spurt in writing in English which was won the authors international recognition.

"It is appropriate that in the new millennium, India gets to play host."

The Commonwealth Writers prize, founded in 1987, is given every year by the London-based Booker Trust that also awards the Booker Prize. The first Commonwealth best book prize was won by Indian author Nayantara Sahgal.

Sahgal, a niece of first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, has won several other prizes for her novels and autobiographical works detailing her family's pioneering role in India's freedom struggle against British rule. She will be chief guest at Friday's awards ceremony.

The nominees for the Commonwealth prize are respective winners in their regions -- Africa, Eurasia, Southeast Asia and South Pacific, and the Caribbean and Canada. The Indian-born Rushdie is in the race for best book for his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet. South African Coetzee's Disgrace, which won him his second Booker Prize last year has also been shortlisted.

Other contenders include the Indian-born Shauna Singh Baldwin for The Body Remembers and Australian Lily Brett for Too Many Men.

The best first book nominees group Nigerian Funso Aiyejina for The Legend of Rockhills and Other Stories, Canadian Jeffrey Moore for Prisoner In a Red-Rose Chain, New Zealander Kapka Kassabova for Reconnaissance and Indian Raj Kamal Jha for The Blue Bedspread.

New Delhi-based journalist Jha, who weaves a tangled tale of deceit, incest and failed relationships in his debut novel, told AFP he never expected to be nominated.

"It sounds banal, I know, but when you are writing your first book you only think of the stuff on the page and whether you are being able to put on paper what you are thinking." Jha, who set his story in Calcutta said he hoped the Commonwealth awards ceremony would usher in a sea-change in New Delhi.

"We do not have the culture of book readings, authors interacting with readers and literary debates. Book launches in Delhi are boring affairs where the book concerned is only incidental and where you see the same jaded faces."

Jha said all he looked forward to was "not winning but exchanging notes on the pain and the joy of writing" with "some very interesting people."

Ten Indians have won the Commonwealth Prize so far.

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