Indian Essayist and Novelist Pankaj Mishra Named Recipient of the Prestigious Weston International Award
- The $75,000 prize recognizes the career achievement of an international author for nonfiction work.
Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra has been named the recipient of the 2024 Weston International Award, which recognizes the career achievement of an international author for nonfiction work. Mishra received the $75,000 prize, administered by the Writers’ Trust of Canada, for his writing which “expands the world’s understanding of the Global South, Western imperialism in Asia, and contemporary spirituality.” The award is a companion to the existing Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, which is awarded annually to a Canadian author for a single work of nonfiction.
The Weston jury chose Mishra for the second annual award because he “proves he is a master of disassembling and uplifting magmatic argument and pressing issues of identity, nationalism, and belonging. Speaking to a time when democracy itself is at stake, he is a light cutting through shadow,” the Foundation said.
Mishra will receive the award on Sept. 16 at the Royal Ontario Museum, where he give a marquee lecture on the topic of intellectual inequality in a shifting world before engaging in an on-stage conversation with a Canadian peer about his career and work.
Mishra began his literary career in 1992 in the Himalayan village of Mashobra, where he contributed essays and reviews to “The Indian Review of Books,” The India Magazine,” and the newspaper The Pioneer. His first book was “Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India,” which described the social and cultural changes in India caused by globalization.
His nonfiction works “expertly mix memoir, travelogue, history, and philosophy,” the Foundation said, as exemplified in books like “An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World; Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond; and A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and Its Neighbours.”
He is also the author of two novels — published 22 years apart — “The Romantics,” which was translated into 11 languages and won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction, and his most recent book “Run and Hide.” His most popular work of nonfiction is the bestselling “Age of Anger: A History of the Present.”
In 2014 Mishra became the first non-Western writer to win Germany’s prestigious Leipzig Book Award for “European Understanding for From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia.” It was also shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in the United Kingdom, the Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award in the United States, and the Lionel Gelber Prize in Canada.
Mishra published the anthology “India in Mind,’” IN 2015, “bringing together some of the best fiction, nonfiction, and poetry about the world’s second most populous nation,” the Foundation said. His writing has been anthologized in several books. His most recent work of nonfiction is “Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire,” a collection of essays that address colonialism, human rights, and weakening Anglo-American hegemony.
Mishra writes literary and political essays for The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and the London Review of Books, among other American, British, and Indian publications. His work has also appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Wall Street Journal, and Granta. He was a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and The New York Times Book Review.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Mishra was named one of Foreign Policy’s top 100 global thinkers and was nominated for Prospect magazine’s list of 50 World Thinkers. He received Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in 2014. At the time, the jury called his prose “distinguished by a mellifluous yet precise phrasing whose generous intelligence speaks to the general reader and specialist alike.”
Mishra graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce from Allahabad University before completing his MA in English Literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He lives in London and Mashobra.