Awards: Out of Print Author, Tanuj Solanki Awarded

Tanuj Solanki has been conferred with the Sahitya Akademi’s 2019 Yuva Puruskar. It is a matter of particular pleasure for us at Out of Print that it is his collection of short stories, Diwali in Muzaffarnagar that has earned him the prize.

We reached out to Tanuj to congratulate him on this achievement and ask him for a comment. 

‘I’m happy with the Sahitya Akademi award. The announcement has come at a time when I’m deep into writing my next book, a novel titled The Machine is Learning, and I must say that the award has led to some increase in motivation.’

Two of the stories in the award-winning collection were selected by Out of Print as finalists in the short story contest that was organised in collaboration with DNA. They were published on the Out of Print blog, as also in DNA.

-  ‘The Sad Unknowability of Dilip Singh’ that author Rebecca Lloyd called ‘a perfectly strange and sad story with a great title’ made its mark in the debut competition in 2014. 

- The 2015 list featured ‘Reasonable Limits’, a 2000 or so word, single sentence existential diatribe.

‘I’m grateful for the platform that the magazine has provided me over the last eight years. My first submission was in November 2011, the second in March 2012, the third in September 2012. It was only for a submission made in January 2013 that I got my first acceptance. When I look back at this – getting rejected the first few times, then the first acceptance, then getting accepted again – I think of how important each email from the OoP id turned out to be in my development as a writer.’

His first book, Neon Noon was published in 2016, also to great acclaim. 

In the acknowledgements Tanuj said, ‘The third chapter appeared in Out of Print magazine, perhaps the best space for short stories in India.’

Out of Print is delighted, of course, at his success, and also at his kind words.

Tanuj is currently busy with his new novel. 

‘Right now, the novel consumes me. It is a form that lures, for it does not mandate precision as a short story does. But it is also a form that punishes, for the variables one has to handle are far greater in number. Sometimes, I wish there was an Out of Print for WIP novels.’

Links to Tanuj’s stories on Out of Print:

Sentatoms begins on a bus and maps a journey, this time in the high mountains. A memoir, a travelogue, an exploration of creativity, a love story, a story of self. ‘For writers, writing is dreaming. For dreamers, dreaming is writing.’

The Same Story through the Theoretical Framework of a Grand Kaleidoscope is a structured series of interwoven examinations – parents, sibling and lover are viewed from the focal point of a young man.

The Same Experiment, Again: In the writing mode characteristic of this work, Tanuj studies the trajectory of a writer’s life-story. Love – love for a woman whose life has diverged from his onto a different mountain path is the narrative thread that frames this work.