The BWW Short Fiction Award 2025 Shortlisted Entries: An Introduction
Bhumika Anand
This, 2025, is the second year of the R K Anand Prize for the BWW Short Fiction Award.
I want to start this announcement post with thank yous. This award would not have been possible if Subodh Sankar from Atta Galatta didn't help by being a partner, if the Bangalore Literature Festival team had not encouraged it, and if Indira Chandrasekhar from Out of Print had not agreed to partner with us. We were lucky to get a really discerning jury that included renowned international author and professor Sonora Jha (author of Intemperance among others), and one of India's stellar young authors, editor, and writing coach Tanuj Solanki (author of Manjhi's Mayhem among others) headed, of course, by the inimitable Indira Chandrasekhar (author of Polymorphism among others) from Out of Print.
As most of our readers might know, this is a memorial award launched last year for my father R K Anand who passed away in 2023 owing to dementia-related complications.
Giving to others even when we don't have much ourselves, always choosing friendship and kindness even when it isn't the easiest choice, working hard and taking pride in one's own work, and fighting for one's rights – these are some of the values my parents instilled in me. I run Bangalore Writers Workshop (BWW) a first-of-its-kind writing and storytelling school established in 2012 in Bangalore with these tenets in mind. As you might imagine, it's not easy. But it is fulfilling. I have made working with authors, especially, aspiring authors my life's work.
In our BWW community, we constantly discuss craft, sure, but we are preoccupied with the human condition. Why are we the way we are? How do we make sense of an ever-changing world? How can we write with empathy and humour because God knows you need a sense of humour to live in the world we do. And this is what we deem as having heart. We may or may not improve as people in this pursuit, but I have definitely seen aspiring writers become emerging writers. This award is to recognise more such writers not just from the BWW community but others across the globe.
And twice now, thanks to all our readers, partners, and participants, I can say we have succeeded.
This year we received 174 entries from places as far as Pakistan and Lesotho in Africa, and a couple from the US. So, a big thank you to everyone who participated.
Our process for this award is quite simple. We longlisted 25 stories after two blind reads. Atta Galatta and team then came up with the ten shortlisted entries. Our jury then scored the winners on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest.
As always, BWWers dominated the list – five this time.
During the prize distribution ceremony at the Bangalore Literature Festival 2025, Tanuj Solanki talked about the kinds of stories that are getting published these days. He said that most of the stories seem to deal with navigating ageing parents and/or grief, that many were speculative in nature, especially stories from authors in Bangalore, who, he felt, gravitated more easily and effectively from realism to fantasy or the fantastical.
As a writing mentor myself, I think I can vouch that this is true. Bangalore, like most cities, demands that we escape the chaotic, loud, irreparable real world and embrace newness that allows for pause, reflection, questioning, and doubt. And with age and adulting, young aspiring writers are navigating situations involving senior family members, familial dynamics, estranged spouses and children, office politics – and there is a keen thread of loss and grief in the stories I have read this year for the award. We've picked the best of the lot (though it was by no means an easy task). I hope you enjoy our shortlisted entries. Congratulations to all our short-listed authors.
In Aditi Chandrashekar's ‘Cycle’, we see a young girl navigate office politics, sexual relationships fairly deftly and powerfully in a Bangalore start-up.
Amit Prabhakar in ‘The Night Stories Ended’, takes on a mythical retelling of Arabian Nights making us examine the very art and nuance of storytelling.
Krishan Shetty in ‘The Thread Remembers’, quietly and tenderly shows us how the act of connecting with a stranger and learning a new craft can unlock sorrow and lead to shared grieving, healing, and reconciliation.
Malcolm Carvalho in ‘Amphibians by Night’, tells a fantastical tale of a Mumbai slum gripped by a flood during a stormy night and makes us ponder about the ramifications of an inequal society.
Pallavi Chelluri in ‘The Purse’, also talks about poverty and the great divide especially in urban landscapes between the haves and the have-nots with the inventive use of surrealism.
Ritika Bali in ‘The Things we Leave Unsaid’, grapples with sibling rivalry and familial misunderstandings at the same time that she focusses on familial connection and reconciliation in the background of shared loss and grief.
In ‘A Place Lost in Time’, Sonu Sabir explores a feminist coming-of-age inter-caste and inter-faith romance in Kerala and its repercussions.
In ‘Death Reimagined’, Sonu Sabbir captures the way religious organisations reclaim power over dissenters of even in and after their death, and how inescapable a knot religion is in society, necessitating the narrator to plan his own epitaph and funeral.
As you will see, all these stories are sharp, powerful, and extremely well-written.
We hope you enjoy them and they spark something creative in you as well.
When Sonora announced our special mention, ‘House of Witches’ by Archana Nair, this is what she said, ‘Archana Nair wrote this incredible story called ‘The House of Witches’ which became this very difficult thing for us to decide between the top two contestants, so congratulations. It's such a moving, powerful story about the three generations of women in this house and it has got this metaphysical element that Tanuj was mentioning earlier, has the grief element to it as well, and is a beautiful story about women's relationships across generations, the difficulty of that – the mother-daughter tensions, the aunts – but also the celebration of that. The women live fulfilling, magical, and witchy lives without men and sort of away from them – self-actualised women but also carrying grief and carrying generational stories between them. It was a beautiful, beautiful story to read.’
But, of course, we could have only one winner and that was ‘Shiuli’ by Ratul Ghosh.
When I first read the story, I had a feeling that this would be the winning entry because Ratul uses craft, emotion, pathos, and pain to great effect to render an unforgettable story. Personally too, as a daughter of a parent who suffered from dementia, it resonated deeply. For years, I lived with the constant fear of someday losing my father and having to file a missing person's report. I imagined that fear so often and lived it so keenly that Ratul's story made me tearful and grateful that I didn't have to go through that angst at least. Indira mentioned the theme of severance in her read of the story and that was absolutely mot juste!
‘Shiuli’ won because of the way it managed to capture the irreconcilable loss that comes from severance.
Congratulations, Ratul.
Thank you for reading this, readers. I hope to post again next year with the list of 2026 winners of the R K Anand Prize for BWW Short Fiction Award.
So, please keep writing, keep reading, and keep exploring.
Thank you for your time.
Warm regards,
Bhumika Anand
Founder and Director
Bangalore Writers Workshop
(www.bangalorewriters.com)
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