7 Award-Winning Books by South Asian Writers

South Asian literature can be painstakingly beautiful, but its sheer breadth can make knowing where to begin a little daunting. Beyond the familiar names that have come to define the canon, there are writers whose work has received serious literary recognition without becoming quite as widely read.

Some are wry, some piercing, some gloriously strange, and others have an almost disarming intimacy to them. There’s no particular order here, because honestly, you should read them all.

A dead war photographer wakes up in the afterlife and is told he has seven days to solve his own murder. It is a ridiculous premise, and somehow Karunatilaka makes it work beautifully, filling the book with ghosts, bureaucrats, corrupt politicians and a great deal of very dark humour. The large cast can be difficult to keep track of, especially as the story moves between the earthly world and the strange, fantastical realm where Maali floats around. Regardless, it is worth finishing for the sheer pleasure of watching Karunatilaka juggle the wit and darkness of it all.

There is something almost painful about reading Dutt describe how carefully she learned to pass as upper caste. She had the skin colour, the education and the family background that allowed her to move through spaces that were closed to so many others, but she was always conscious of what she had to conceal. It is a difficult book in the best possible sense.

There will always be a bunch of books you read and think to yourself, “Wow, I really wish I had picked this one up earlier”, and this one is to make that list for certain. What makes Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer so compelling is the world it brings into focus, where Mistry writes about the Parsi khandhias, the corpse bearers treated as untouchable because their work brings them into contact with the dead. This is especially good for someone who wants to know about Parsi history, and its many layers.

Heart Lamp is the kind of collection where a story can make you laugh and then leave you slightly horrified a paragraph later. Mushtaq writes about women dealing with marriage, motherhood, inheritance and religion, but she finds her sharpest material in the small, ridiculous rules that govern their lives. The stories are written with such warmth and dry humour that their cruelties sneak up on you, which makes the moments of heartbreak all the more gut-wrenching.

This is a wonderfully strange family novel, full of the kind of people you would probably avoid at a family gathering and desperately want to keep reading about. Salim follows a sprawling Kerala family through its feuds, marriages, deaths and religious anxieties, with a narrator who has a very good eye for the ridiculous. The writing is darkly funny and occasionally quite absurd, but there is real tenderness underneath all the bickering. Read it if you like your family dramas a little unhinged.

This one will break your heart, but it has a surprisingly good sense of humour about it. Set in a one-bedroom Mahim flat, it follows a family living with Em’s bipolar disorder, while trying to preserve the ordinary rhythms of family life. Pinto writes about her illness without reducing her to only that. The narrator’s observations are funny, affectionate and sometimes brutally honest. Read it for the Bombay of it all, the family chaos and the extraordinary tenderness with which Pinto writes about a mother who is ill, difficult, hilarious and deeply loved.

This is a book with a very particular kind of sadness, but Desai has enough mischief in her writing to keep you flipping. There is an old judge in a crumbling house in Kalimpong, his granddaughter, a cook and his son working illegally in New York, and somehow food, loneliness, class and the ghosts of empire keep turning up in all their lives. Desai can be wonderfully funny about people who take themselves far too seriously, while her descriptions of the mountains and monsoon are gorgeous.