Easterine Kire wins The Hindu Prize

Nagaland’s Easterine Kire, a poet, novelist and children’s writer won The Hindu Prize, 2015. for her novel ‘When the River Sleeps’, a book about a lone hunter seeking a heart stone in a faraway sleeping river and fighting all odds to get it. According to a report in The Hindu, K. Satchidanandan, one of the judges, described the book as “a sample of how the mythopaeic imagination can work in our times”. Satchidanandan opined that Nagaland, with its profound symbolism offered an alternative way of life, remained mostly unexplored in Indian fiction and the book Earlier, Ms. Kire, had read out an excerpt from her novel, in which she described a scene in which the protagonist and another man escape from a river with the spirits of widow women chasing after them with spears and curses. The award was given away by author Alexander McCall Smith Saturday at the ongoing Lit for Life event organised by The Hindu at Sri Mutha Venkatasubba Rao Concert Hall, Chetpet.