Rahul Bhattacharya’s debut novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care, won the Ondaatje prize for 2012.

Nominated for a number of other prizes as well, the novel tells the tale of a 26-year-old Indian journalist who gives up his job to live in Guyana, where he can “escape the deadness of life”. There, he falls in love not only with the country, but also with a woman.

Bhattacharya says that Guyana itself was the inspiration for the novel. “Usually the question of what inspired a book, which authors get asked all the time, is very hard to answer, but this time it’s very easy. It was Guyana — something about it made me feel I wanted to capture the spirit of the place. I wanted to be able to try and recreate it, to try and talk about what creates a place, a society, like that, to say something about its beauty and troubles,” he said. “It is a book of place.”

The prize is awarded by the Royal Society of Literature for the book which best summons up “the spirit of a place”. The Delhi-based Bhattacharya spent a year in Guyana before writing his novel. Kamila Shamsie, who was part of the judging panel, commended “the combination of Bhattacharya’s prose style, his great curiosity and generous-though-not-uncritical eye, the light touch with which he conveys knowledge, and the sheer pleasure of his company”.