LAHORE: Writer and translator Bilal Tanweer has won the 2014 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize for his novel “The Scatter Here Is Too Great”. This award is named after journalist Shakti Bhatt, who had passed away in 2007.

The judges for this year’s award were: authors Amit Chaudhuri, AatishTaseer and Mridula Koshy.

Mr Tanweer, who is an alumnus of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), is also serving as visiting faculty member at LUMS Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

The writer’s fiction, poetry and translations have appeared in various international magazines including Granta, Vallum, Critical Muslim, and Words Without Borders. He was one of Granta’s “New Voices for 2011” and one of the eleven recipients of the 2010 PEN Translation Fund Grant.

He holds an MFA in Writing (fiction) from the Columbia University for which he received a Fulbright Scholarship. He was also named an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing Programme at the University of Iowa.

Mr Tanweer’s debut novel “The Scatter Here is Too Great” was published in the Indian Subcontinent by Random House in December 2013. It was published in the UK (Jonathan Cape), US (Harper Collins) and France (Editions Grasset&Fasquelle) in 2014.

The book opens with a bomb going off at Cantonment Station in Karachi. There are dead bodies. It is the end of the world for some, while for others, it is another day in the city.

The novel takes a sweep in time and space and the vastness of Karachi to examine a host of characters: an old communist poet, Comrade Sukhansaz, who goes missing after the bomb blast; a girl’s heart breaks for love lost; a father must confront the tangle of relationships he has avoided for many years; an ambulance driver sees two strange men roaming the streets that nobody else seems to have noticed.

Among the survivors of the explosion, a writer tries to make sense of it all. He tries to gather the scatter, trying to claim everything that is broken and beautiful to him in the city.

Published in Dawn December 4th , 2014